[beloch]

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]

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.

[xingped]

What the hell is AI token farming?

[largbae]

I think they mean serving inference workloads

[scheme271]

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.

[0xack]

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.

[packetlost]

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

[idiotsecant]

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.