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.
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.
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 used for cloud computing and AI applications, and rendering for engineering applications, in addition to scientific modelling of fluid dynamics.”
All Comments