I’ve been reading alot about AI compute stuff lately and something keeps bothering me. The total power used for cryptocoin mining around the world is huge. Were talking petahashes per second on networks like Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin and others. Most of that power is spent on one simple thing, solving hash puzzles that dont do anything useful outside keeping the network running. At the same time AI training is running into a real shortage of compute. Training the biggest models needs special setups that only a few big companies can get. The compute is mostly stuck in the hands of a couple of large cloud services.Ive started wondering if anyone is trying to connect these two worlds, taking that mining power and pointing it at real AI work while still keeping the security of proof of work. There are some projects looking into it. Qubic looks like one of the more serious ones, they seem to be using mining power for neural network training instead of just random hashing. My question for people who know about compute infrastructure is this. Is this even possible at big scale? What are the main problems with using all that spread out mining hardware for AI training? And if it actually worked, what would it mean for who gets to control AI compute? submitted by /u/srodland01
Originally posted by u/srodland01 on r/ArtificialInteligence