Microsoft Patents Training AI on Volunteers' Idle Gaming GPUs
Microsoft has filed a patent for filling the shortage of server capacity with volunteers’ home computers: a background process watches CPU and GPU load, temperature and power draw, and once a machine sits idle it receives small training tasks. Work is distributed by how available and how reliable each node is, judged by its track record of accurate computation, so slow or faulty machines get less.
Participants would be paid in cash, software purchase credits, or priority access to the trained models, and the patent covers the sign-up and payout side as well as the scheduling. It is a filed patent rather than a shipped product, so no pricing or launch date exists yet.
Related: Meta Plans to Rent Out Its AI Compute Clusters, Nvidia and Microsoft Unveil RTX Spark Superchip for AI-Native PCs