← Back to context

Comment by scheme271

15 hours ago

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.

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.

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.