Sharing your GPU
Sharing a machine is how its models become reachable by someone else. It is always an explicit choice: nothing you do as a consumer ever turns your machine into one that serves other people.
What sharing commits you to
When you share a machine, it serves requests from the people you shared it with while your GPU is idle. Sharing yours does not share theirs with you: each direction is a separate decision by the person whose machine it is.
Two things are worth being clear about before you start:
- Your own work takes priority on your own GPU. A request from someone you share with is dropped when your own work arrives, at the next step of the work rather than instantly.
- You will see what you serve. Serving a request means your machine handles that person's prompt in the clear, because that is how it computes the answer. The other side of this is documented for consumers in Privacy and egress; sharing puts you on the receiving end of that trust.
The full version of what sharing a machine commits you to, including what serving does not expose and who is answerable for what, is the Acceptable Use Policy. Read it before you run the wizard below rather than after: running it is the act that agrees to it.
Requirements
| Hardware | A GPU the daemon can serve from. NVIDIA via cuda, Apple Silicon via metal. |
| Binary | A build with an inference backend compiled in. Released binaries have one. |
| An account | You must be signed in with an active Saylek account. |
A from-source build with no --features flag compiles but cannot serve: the first call
returns HTTP 503 no inference backend compiled in. Build with cpu, cuda, or metal.
Start sharing
Get a model serving first, if you have not already:
saylek gpu wizard
Then turn sharing on:
saylek host wizard
The wizard is what actually turns sharing on: it sets [host].enabled, resolves and writes
the models you will advertise, mints the machine credential and installs the background
service. saylek gpu wizard above gets a model serving locally, which is a different thing
and does not start sharing. Bare saylek host is the serve verb for a machine that is
already set up; on one that is not, it refuses and points you back here.
Afterwards, saylek host runs the up-path in the foreground if you want to watch it.
Confirm what your machine is offering:
saylek models # what this machine can serve right now
saylek status # health, and whether you are connected
Stopping: three different scopes
These are easy to confuse, and one of them is much larger than people expect.
| You want to | Command | What keeps working |
|---|---|---|
| Stop serving other people, keep using Saylek yourself | saylek host pause | Your own inference, and who you share with |
| Stop the daemon entirely | saylek stop | Nothing. saylek call will not answer until saylek start |
| Step away from Saylek but keep your account | saylek settings account deactivate | Reversible with activate |
saylek host pause is the small, targeted one, and it is what the "Pause contributing"
control on your home page does.
There is no bare saylek pause. "Pause" means two different things at two different scopes,
so the CLI does not guess which one you meant: it answers with both commands and lets you
pick. Use saylek host pause when you mean serving other people, and saylek stop when you
mean the daemon.
Checking what your machine served
saylek statement <YYYY-MM>
A record of where each request ran. Nothing is owed in either direction.
Next steps
- Sharing and access: who your machine will serve.
- Troubleshooting: when your machine shows as offline.
- CLI reference: the full everyday command table.
Last checked 2026-09-03 · read as markdown at /docs/share-your-models.md