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Crypto-miners are switching to AI token farming when bitcoin is low. They have compute that's both installed and powered, so why not do what pays better?
by beloch 6mo ago
Crypto-miners are switching to AI token farming when bitcoin is low. They have compute that's both installed and powered, so why not do what pays better?
- londons_explore 6mo agoFor bitcoin at least, you need totally different silicon. I guess you could share the power supply and cooling infra, but I am dubious the savings are enough to have half your silicon idle all the time.
- xingped 6mo agoWhat the hell is AI token farming?
- largbae 6mo agoI think they mean serving inference workloads
- scheme271 6mo agoHow does that work? Isn't most bitcoin mining done on custom ASICs? I didn't think that the ASIC could be repurposed for inference.
- packetlost 6mo agoThe biggest cost is the power which is often on multi year contracts. The hardware is comparatively cheap
- idiotsecant 6mo agoThat's wildly inaccurate. The cost in enormous both on the inference side and the mining side and has short lifetimes if you want SOTA.
- 0xack 6mo agoTraining ASICs (like Google’s TPUs) can generally run inference too, since inference is a subset of training computations. TPUs are widely used for both. Mining ASICs (Bitcoin, etc.) cannot be repurposed…they’re hardwired for a single hash algorithm and lack matrix math needed for neural networks.