Chutes dominates onchain inference requests as Surplus sees rapid growth

The AI inference market is quietly being rewired from underneath. Two decentralized platforms, Chutes and Surplus Intelligence, are pulling an increasing share of onchain inference requests by doing something deceptively simple: 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. Together, they represent a growing thesis that centralized AI providers are charging too much for what is, at its core, commodity compute. How Chutes became the default Chutes launched publicly in late January 2025 as a decentralized serverless inference platform. Independent miners with spare graphics cards serve open-source AI models on demand, and users pay per token processed. The pricing tells the story. Chutes charges single-digit cents per million tokens for certain models, a fraction of what centralized alternatives typically command for equivalent workloads. After monetization kicked in post-launch, daily token throughput climbed to that 120 billio...