• Zier@fedia.io
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    7 hours ago

    Abandon the bitcoin scam, full steam ahead for the AI scam!!!

    • OwlPaste@lemmy.world
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      9 hours ago

      How would they make money from ai? be like chatgpt and release their own ai plans or something? or something else?

      • ZoteTheMighty@lemmy.zip
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        5 hours ago

        Make no mistake; the people selling server time will be making money. They are selling a real product to a real customer, it’s just the customer is a tech company that will never make money back in turn.

      • BlueKey@fedia.io
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        9 hours ago

        Maybe host open source models and offer paid access for customers who need big generating capacities.

        • HakFoo@lemmy.sdf.org
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          5 hours ago

          Aren’t most miners running ASICs that are pretty much only useful for mining specific coins? I was hoping we were past the last “people are buying off-the-shelves GPUs for crypto” bubble.

          • jimerson@lemmy.world
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            5 hours ago

            Depending on which crypto, but yes. And the ASICs have a usable shelf life of just a few years, so I assume they are migrating to machines for AI processing as their ASICs need routine replacement.

          • boatswain@infosec.pub
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            5 hours ago

            As long as we’re being pedantic, when you pay out pitch, you’re not covering the deck with it. You’re making lines of it that go in between the deck planks. It’s basically caulking. You actually have to be careful to not get it everywhere (not least because pitch is really hot when you’re paying it out), so just like when you’re paying out a line, there’s a sense of careful control and easing out the pitch.

      • jj4211@lemmy.world
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        8 hours ago

        Same way a lot of the “ai” companies make money, investors that have no idea but want to get in on the ground floor of the next nVidia or openai.

        • Zos_Kia@lemmynsfw.com
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          4 hours ago

          No they play a different game and leverage hardware. Most probably they’ll buy H100s instead of ASIC and run AI inference on that. It turns out that inference can be pretty profitable if you have good utilization and don’t need to train your own models.

      • Ludicrous0251@piefed.zip
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        9 hours ago

        In theory you could lease your server capacity to the big AI players, but then they would have to trust you -a noted crypto grifter - with their data.

    • real_squids@sopuli.xyz
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      7 hours ago

      Hey now, at least bitcoin has it’s uses. And if you have a farm for it I doubt you’re scamming on the side, that’s risky.

  • ook@discuss.tchncs.de
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    9 hours ago

    I don’t get it. What are they even seling then? Bitcoins I understand, but AI? Just enabling scams?

  • addie@feddit.uk
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    8 hours ago

    especially if you have the infrastructure in place

    I thought Bitcoin mining made no sense at all on GPUs any more? Unless you were running ASICs then the power costs just weren’t worth it, and application-specific is part of the acronym, there. Why would these things even be able to run an LLM?

    In any case, Bitcoin just needs to iterate as fast as possible in order to find a match, doesn’t really need a lot of RAM. Whereas LLMs need really large amounts - NVIDIA’s latest data centre racks have about a terabyte for a reason. Even if you had cornered the market on GPUs five years ago for Bitcoin, what use are those cards for this?

    • squaresinger@lemmy.world
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      3 hours ago

      Mining hardware is shortlived. These things get outdated real fast and need to be replaced frequently. So what they do is when a mining rig is up for replacement, they just swap it out for an AI rig.

      The real asset for mining is the infrastructure: rack space, access to cheap electricity, data centers. All of that is very useful for AI as well.

    • dhork@lemmy.world
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      8 hours ago

      If I read the article property, the real asset is the rackspace and power they are already leasing. They would tear out the existing Bitcoin mining infrastructure and replace it with AI servers.

    • panda_abyss@lemmy.ca
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      7 hours ago

      Some of these bought decommissioned power plants like old coal plants, so they’re getting wholesale prices for energy.

    • jj4211@lemmy.world
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      8 hours ago

      One this is all speak to convince investors to throw money, so they’ll cheer pick their interpretation.

      In this case I think they refer to already having the real estate, buildings, power and cooling. So “all” they have to do is rip out their rigs and dump a bunch of nVidia gear in. All they need is just a few hundred million from some lucky investors and they will be off…

      • Zos_Kia@lemmynsfw.com
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        4 hours ago

        I think you misunderstand that scene. Bitcoin miners are crazy rich and most of them are investors in their own right. They don’t need outside money.

  • jaykrown@lemmy.world
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    5 hours ago

    The difference between AI and Bitcoin is that people actually use AI to do productive things.