Chutes and Surplus Disrupt AI Inference Market with Decentralized Compute
Two decentralized platforms, Chutes and Surplus Intelligence, are disrupting the AI inference market by making it cheaper to run AI models. Chutes, built on Bittensor's Subnet 64, has processed over 34 trillion tokens cumulatively, with daily peaks exceeding 120 billion tokens.
Surplus Intelligence, which launched just two months ago, has already spiked to 2.5 million requests and 107 billion input tokens. This rapid growth represents a growing thesis that centralized AI providers are charging too much for what is essentially commodity compute.
Chutes uses permissionless GPU miners who are scored on capacity, speed, and availability, creating a competitive marketplace where the best-performing hardware wins more jobs. Security is handled through Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), which keep data private even from the miners processing it.