Not gonna work, will be starved by inter node bandwidth.

Hm, looks like this is an old project (2022) associated with HuggingFace (https://huggingface.co/bigscience).

Doesn't look like it's very active nowadays: https://github.com/bigscience-workshop/petals

Article with more details: https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/20/petals-is-creating-a-free-...

> [...] volunteers can donate their hardware power to tackle a portion of a text-generating workload and team up others to complete larger tasks, similar to Folding@home and other distributed compute setups.

It's an interesting concept but the timing is probably too early. If more people had reliable low latency gigabit or ideally 10gbit throughput, then it might start to approach feasibility. There's other blockers too, but that springs to mind immediately.

It's cool to imagine a planet wide neural network interconnected with fiber - the nervous system of a planetary intelligence. But perhaps mushrooms do that already (Alpha Centauri ever relevant).