As artificial intelligence (AI) rapidly works its complex magic on one sector of the economy after another, there is an increasingly pressing need for compute resources to power all this machine intelligence.
Training a model like ChatGPT costs more than $5 million, and running the early ChatGPT demo, even before usage increased to its current level, costs OpenAI around $100,000 per day. And AI is more than just text generation; applying AI to practical problems across multiple industries requires similar large neural models trained on a diversity of data types — medical, financial, customer information, geospatial and so forth. Moving beyond the limitations of current neural net AI toward systems with higher levels of artificial general intelligence will almost surely be even more compute intensive.
It’s only natural that a small but increasing number of crypto miners are now looking at how to leverage their own compute infrastructures to help push forward the AI revolution.
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Bitcoin (BTC) mining remains a lucrative business. Mining other cryptocurrencies can still make money as well, but it is a rapidly shifting landscape. Ether (ETH) miners, for instance, took a major hit late last year when the Ethereum network shifted from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake.
The economic and technical situation in the crypto space over the last two years has driven an increasing number of crypto mining organizations to explore the potential of leveraging their facilities for other purposes, such as high-performance computing and, in particular, AI.
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The specific computing hardware needed for high-performance computing (HPC) or AI processing is often different from what’s optimal for crypto mining. But buying servers is generally not the most difficult part of setting up a mining farm. Getting the electrical power and cooling and security and other physical infrastructure in place is a major cost and effort, and all this remains roughly the same whether one is hosting RAM-light GPUs appropriate for ETH mining or RAM-heavy GPUS appropriate for AI model learning.
Mining firm Hut 8 has led the way, leveraging its formerly mining-dedicated compute facilities for machine learning and other HPC applications. Hive Blockchain has been doing the same thing for some time, filling its servers with processor cards that “can be…
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