I’ve been thinking recently about how the AI boom could be helping to decentralize bitcoin mining.
Companies are buying up all the power in western countries for AI data centers. I haven’t seen any recent stats, but I’m expecting that this is encouraging bitcoin mining to move and find lower cost power elsewhere.
Bitcoin’s incentives could be playing out in front of our eyes.
I wonder if AI will go through similar situation as bitcoin. All the talking heads are convinced that AI datacenters are just going to eat massive amount of countries power.
But like bitcoin you can’t always extrapolate growth into the future.
All these AI trainers are going to realize they bought tons of power and data center space, and not have enough work to do, so they will be forced to get into bitcoin mining on the side, just like Bitcoin miners are currently getting into AI on the side.
seems logical since GPUs are good at hashing, just not as good as asics
they could also be used to do massive simulations, and in any case, there is many variants of computational intelligence
AFAIK, AI data centers have significantly surpassed Bitcoin in terms of electricity consumption already.
It'll depend on how well AI can actually make money.
I think we'll see kind of a plateau of AI models over the next 5 years. LLMs will have reached a level of "skill" that will make it useful for many things related to interacting directly with humans/content. But there won't be a big break through, like AI models pushing scientific progress on their own towards some kind of singularity.
So maybe we'll see some kind of bubble burst with all the sunk investments not really having delivered uses of AI that people/companies are willing to pay lots of money for.
(Oh wait, maybe dating companions and matching algos that actually work well and bring soulmates together could make money ^^)
AI will probably also be more politically acceptible than Bitcoin mining over the next few years.
Don't forget the arbitrage between AI load and ASIC load ... only one of these is "instant" on/off grid balancing
Hashrate dropping but apparently miners not selling. ASICs in transit to cheaper locales?
