That’s the whole point, VCs invested heavily in GPUs anticipating a crypto boom and when that never happened they had to find some other snake oil to peddle that happened to require GPUs.
My experience with the AI boom couldn't be more different - everyone from my colleagues to my mum are using chatgpt as a daily tool.
I really don't think that AI and crypto are comparable in terms of their current practical usage.
At the peak of the crypto boom/hype cycle I took on a little project to look at the top 10 blockchain networks/coins/whatever.
From what I could tell a very, very, very generous estimate is that crypto at best has MAUs in the low tens of millions.
ChatGPT alone got to 100 million MAUs within a year of release and has only grown since.
ChatGPT 10x'd actual real world usage of GPUs (and resulting power and other resources) in a year vs ~15 years for crypto.
> I really don't think that AI and crypto are comparable in terms of their current practical usage.
A massive understatement!
In other words, it has nothing to do with AI.
I wasn’t talking about the applicability of GPUs for crypto, I was talking about adoption and real world utility.
GPUs in AI provide far more value and utility than crypto ever has regardless of how/if it’s mined with them or not.
Two points:
1. GPUs for AI != GPUs for crypto. They are not the same systems. There is a tiny bit of overlap, but most people bought underpowered gpus that were focused on ROI. For example, you didn't need more than 8GB ram. You also didn't need ultrafast networking.
2. Value is subjective.
At work setting in a tech company, there seems to be a handful that are very in love with AI, a bunch that use it here or there, and a large majority that (at least publically) don't even use it. It's be interesting to see what company enforced spyware would say about ai uptake though for real.