Prodia : Do we need another distributed GPU provider?
There are already many centralized and decentralized GPU marketplaces (Render, Io.Net, Akash). Do we need another one? Let’s find out.
Overview
Prodia was founded in 2022. It is distributed GPU cloud focusing on AI inference with 50%-90% cost reductions and fast generation speeds (Avg 400% faster). It currently does inference for image generation but will expand to videos and other modalities soon.
It is founded in 2022 by Shawn Wilkinson (previously founded Storj - distributed cloud storage). Prodia started when Shawn started an AI app that went from 200 to 100K users in just 2 months but it became impossible to find reasonably priced GPUs at Lambda, AWS & Google cloud.
Current GPU marketplace Overview & Prodia’s Strength
Currently many companies overpay for GPUs because they project future demand and often have to sign-multi-year contract and have to pay per hour. Companies often find themselves paying above market rates not only during high demand but also during normal demand.
Prodia not only costs less but it also has different price model. It charges per image generated instead for the underlying hardware.
It is also more affordable because customers don’t have to design complicated servers maintain servers and deploy nodes. Other things that lead to reduced price are basic economies of scale: Get the right GPU at the right place for the right job (you can do AI generation closer to user), smarter in terms of load balancing, different acceleration libraries, right latency etc.
It’s another highlight is ease of use (their simple API can be integrated in just 5 mins). To restate the founder’s message “We have made it so easy to add AI into any application that our customers don’t even need to know what a GPU is”.
Current clients & Network Usage
At the time of writing according to the founder, In terms of usage, Prodia is the largest decentralized GPU platform. In upcoming months, they also plan to become the bigger than other DePIN GPU projects combined.
Pixlr Image editor which has 10 million users is powered by Prodia.
Prodia has also generated ~400 million images till now with an average generation time of 2 seconds (Standard deployments of Stable Diffusion have inference times that take 6 to 8 sec)
Prodia’s future plans
The generative AI market is set to expand to $1.3 trillion by 2030
Prodia aims to target a big segment of this market, eventually expanding to video generation. (Video generation is 300 to 500 times more compute intensive than image generation.)
In future Prodia also plans to integrate other decentralized GPU marketplaces which will be a net win for the ecosystem.
References
The No BS Guide to Crypto AI with Prodia - Shawn Wilkinson, Prodia, Ep. 260
Prodia's unique take on decentralized compute
Generative AI to Become a $1.3 Trillion Market by 2032, Research Finds
Prodia.com
X - @ani_pai || @super3