# Hive Mode -- Team Compute Sharing

## META
- relevance: FEATURE -- key differentiator for community adoption and viral growth
- created: 2026-02-13

## CONCEPT

Hive Mode allows groups of users (friends, colleagues, teams) to selectively share their compute nodes, creating a collaborative GPU pool. Each member contributes their hardware and benefits from the collective. Think: "BitTorrent for GPU compute" but with privacy controls and attribution.

## USE CASES

### Friends Pooling GPUs
- Alice has an RTX 4090, Bob has an M4 Max, Charlie has a cloud VPS
- They create a Hive together
- Each can now run models across all three devices
- When Alice sleeps, Bob and Charlie use her 4090 for heavy inference
- Cost: $0 (they already own the hardware)

### Small Team / Startup
- 5-person startup, each with development machines
- Create a team Hive with company's 2 VPS instances
- Shared compute pool for all team members
- Individual usage tracking for cost attribution
- Cheaper than cloud GPU providers

### Community Cluster
- Local AI meetup group creates a Hive
- 20 members contribute various hardware
- Collectively can run 70B+ models that no individual could
- Community leaderboard: who contributes most compute

## ARCHITECTURE

### Hive Structure
```
Hive (Team Account)
├── Owner (creator, admin privileges)
├── Members (invited, acceptance required)
├── Nodes (hardware contributed by members)
│   ├── Alice's RTX 4090 (shared: ON, privacy: standard)
│   ├── Bob's M4 Max (shared: ON, privacy: strict)
│   ├── Charlie's VPS (shared: ON, privacy: standard)
│   └── Team Server (shared: ON, privacy: off)
└── Policies
    ├── Usage limits per member
    ├── Priority rules (owner's jobs > members)
    └── Privacy settings per node
```

### Node Sharing Controls (Per Node)
- **Shared: ON/OFF**: Toggle whether this node is available to Hive
- **Privacy Level**:
  - OFF: Any Hive member's data can be processed (team server)
  - Standard: Data processed but not cached across users
  - Strict: Only owner's data on this node (contributes compute via pipeline parallelism only)
- **Availability Schedule**: E.g., "share after 10pm on weekdays, all day weekends"
- **Resource Limits**: "Share up to 80% GPU, keep 20% for my own use"

### Usage Attribution
- Per-member tracking: who used how much compute, when
- Fair-share scheduling: prevent one member from monopolizing
- Contribution score: how much compute each member contributes
- Billing split (optional): if Hive has paid tier, split cost by usage

### Conductor Integration
- Conductor sees all Hive nodes as available compute
- Routes requests considering: node availability, privacy settings, member priority
- Cross-node distributed inference (exo) for large models across Hive
- Cache sharing within Hive (with privacy controls)

## SECURITY & PRIVACY

### Trust Model
- All Hive communication through Headscale/WireGuard mesh (encrypted, zero-trust)
- Each member authenticates with their own LLMHosts identity
- Node-level privacy controls enforced by node agent (cannot be overridden by Hive admin)
- Audit log: who processed what on whose node (metadata only, no prompt content)

### Data Isolation
- By default: prompts processed on remote node are NOT cached on that node
- Strict privacy: only pipeline activations flow (model layers), not raw prompts
- Owner can always see: who used their node, when, how much compute
- Owner CANNOT see: what prompts were processed (unless privacy=OFF)

### Invitation & Access
- Owner creates Hive, gets invite link/code
- Members accept invitation, connect their nodes
- Owner can remove members (nodes disconnect immediately)
- Member can leave anytime (their nodes disconnect)

## GAMIFICATION

### Hive Leaderboard
- Contribution score: GPU-hours contributed to the Hive
- Efficiency score: how well member uses Hive resources
- Savings score: how much the Hive saves collectively

### Achievements
- "Hive Founder": Create your first Hive
- "Generous Node": Contribute 100+ GPU-hours to Hive
- "Night Owl": Share compute during off-hours
- "Distributed Giant": Run a 70B model across Hive nodes

## PRICING INTERACTION

### Free Tier
- Create a Hive with up to 3 members
- Basic sharing features
- Standard routing

### Pro Tier
- Unlimited Hive members
- Advanced sharing controls (scheduling, resource limits)
- Priority routing across Hive
- Contribution analytics
- Hive-level savings dashboard
