FAQ

B3IQ is a neocloud: dedicated GPU machines, bought or leased through B3IQ or enrolled from your own hardware, that serve your inference free and unmetered through an OpenAI-compatible gateway. The host agent gives a machine a node identity, local OpenAI-compatible endpoints, runtime and benchmark probing, signed heartbeats, and receipts, and the control plane binds it to a registry so your own API keys and CLI can reach it. Earning is optional — an idle, claimed machine can pick up B3IQ-directed workloads, or you can flip it to Earn mode to offer it to external GPU marketplaces.

The local API runs on your own machine. The host agent serves an OpenAI-compatible endpoint at http://127.0.0.1:8831, backed by whatever runtime and model you have installed. No routing, no billing — your prompts and outputs stay local unless you send them to a routed workflow.

The hosted gateway at https://b3iq.org/v1/api is a network endpoint. It routes your requests across the machines on your own account by health and readiness, enforces customer policy, and meters usage — inference is free. You call it like any OpenAI-compatible API with a gateway key.

There's no approval step. Joining the fleet is invite/manual onboarding: a new machine enrolls with an onboarding code the B3IQ team issues, and a machine that was pre-onboarded on your behalf is linked to your account by redeeming a claim code in the dashboard. Once a machine is onboarded and claimed, it serves your own inference immediately — no admin sign-off in between, and no separate review gates earning either.

B3IQ supports common local inference runtimes — Ollama, llama.cpp, MLX (on Apple Silicon), and LocalAI — plus advanced setups that expose an OpenAI-compatible server. The setup wizard probes your machine and recommends one; the host agent verifies the runtime is reachable before a model profile is marked route-ready.

Yes. The b3iq CLI signs in with b3iq login (a browser device flow) or a personal access token from Settings → CLI tokens, then lets you list machines, install or remove models, restart runtimes, tail logs, and open an SSH session — all without touching a ProxyCommand. Each machine also has a native SSH lane you can enable from its dashboard page, and organizations can set fleet-wide SSH keys that reconcile onto every machine they own.

Transport is encrypted from public surfaces and between nodes and the control plane, and the control plane does not retain the prompts or outputs of routed gateway requests. But be clear-eyed about the trust boundary: when work runs on a node, the node operator can see the plaintext prompt and output for that request, because inference happens in process on their machine.

Verified-confidential / TEE execution — where the operator could not read request content — is future work, not something B3IQ provides today. Do not treat routed inference as confidential against the node operator.

Earning requires two things on top of a running node: claim the node to your B3 account, and reach route readiness so B3IQ will dispatch directed work to it. There's no separate approval step — a claimed, route-ready machine earns automatically the moment it serves directed work. That work produces signed receipts; payouts batch-settle rather than per-request, and earnings are shown in USD. An installed model alone is not enough — the node also has to be online, in its default (bare metal) operating mode rather than Earn mode, benchmark-observed, and queue-healthy.

Inference is free. Buy (or bring) a machine, claim it to your account, and your API keys route to it at no per-request charge — there are no credits, no prepaid balance, and no top-ups. Usage is metered per key and per account so you can see what ran, and accounts carry an optional daily token quota that defaults to uncapped. When your machine is idle, B3IQ can direct paid workloads to it and it earns — see the earnings page.

Open a ticket from the dashboard's Support tab — replies from the B3IQ team land on the same thread. B3IQ also emails a machine's owner automatically if it goes offline, its GPU runs hot, or its disk fills up, so you don't have to watch the dashboard for early warning signs.

No — B3IQ is in pilot, and we report status honestly. The macOS desktop GUI and Authenticode-signed Windows desktop GUI are current pilot surfaces; the Linux GUI is gated while package trust and VM evidence complete. The hosted gateway, receipts, and payout settlement are live for pilot use, but the network is still maturing. Check the current-status page for live evidence and launch gates before you build on it.