Stable Horde
Horde AI or Stable Horde is a distributed cluster of GPUs. The project describes itself as a "volunteer crowd-sourced distributed cluster of image and text generation workers". This translates as s network of individual GPU users that "lend" their devices and stored large language models. This means that one can generate an image from any device connected to this network through an interface, e.g. a website through a phone. While the visible effects are the same as using chatGPT, co-pilot or any other proprietary service, the images in this network are "community" generated. The request is not sent to a server farm or a company, but to a user that is willing to share their GPU power and stored models. Haidra, the non-profit associated with HordeAI, seeks to make AI free, open-source, and collaborative, effectively circumventing the reliance on AI bit-tech players.
Projects like Stable Horde/HordeAI offer a glimpse into the possibilities of autonomy in the world of image generation, and offer other ways of volunteering through technical means. In a way, this project inherits some of the ethos of P2P sharing and recursive publics, yet updated for the world of LLMs. The GPU used in this project is (intermittently), part of the HordeAI network, generatig and using the kudos currency.
