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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?

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For 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.

What the hell is AI token farming?

I think they mean serving inference workloads

How does that work? Isn't most bitcoin mining done on custom ASICs? I didn't think that the ASIC could be repurposed for inference.

The biggest cost is the power which is often on multi year contracts. The hardware is comparatively cheap

That's wildly inaccurate. The cost in enormous both on the inference side and the mining side and has short lifetimes if you want SOTA.

Training 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.

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