The logical conclusion is that they (the models) will eventually be linked to crypto payments though. This is where Lightning becomes important...

Edit: To clarify, I'm not suggesting linking these Petal "tokens" to any payment system. I'm talking about, in general, calls to clusters of machine learning models, decentralized or not, will likely use crypto payments because it gives you auth and a means of payment.

I do think Petal is a good implementation of using decentralized compute for model use and will likely be valuable long term.