Why are bitcoin miners now AI companies?
14th November 2023
Welcome to AI Collision,
In today’s collision between AI and our world,
Grok’s 8,000 A100s
Cat videos prove AI pins are stupid
Where’s Waldo?
If that’s enough to get the data flowing, read on…
AI Collision 💥
The big news in the last week or two was Elon Musk releasing X.com’s generative AI, Grok, which I wrote about last week.
What we didn’t know at the time was the unbelievable hardware that Grok was learning from and the exponential growth to come coming over the next few months.
On a podcast recently Elon said,
“Grok was trained on 8,000 A100s running at peak efficiency and Grok’s going to get a lot better, by the way, we will be more than doubling our compute every couple months for the next several months.”
The A100s he’s talking about are Nvidia’s A100 GPUs. These A100s vary in price, but there’s a rough estimate that they cost around $10,000 per chip.
So if Grok is trained on 8,000 of them…
The other thing is that they will be doubling their compute every couple of months!
8,000 becomes 16,000, which becomes 32,000, which then becomes 64,000 pretty quick. Before long Elon will be spending $1 billion on keeping Grok alive!
This of course bodes well for Nvidia. But I’m not here today to tell you about Nvidia. What this is all indicating is the immense demand for AI hardware but also for “AI-grunt”.
AI-grunt is my way of saying developers and innovators looking to use AI systems to help build and operate their applications.
Not everyone can throw tens of millions of dollars every couple of months at hardware they own for themselves – and don’t forget the ongoing costs to run that hardware.
But much like companies now run applications from “the cloud”, we’ll start to see more and more companies renting AI services from the cloud too.
That means for companies that have plenty of AI-grunt we could be looking at some serious upside as the world goes full AI.
In particular, we’re starting to see a lot of bitcoin mining companies turning their attention (and AI-grunt) to the world of AI and HPC (high performance computing) services.
That’s because bitcoin mining typically uses hardware like Nvidia GPUs to maintain efficiency and operational flexibility.
While they can make a mint from mining bitcoin, they can possibly make more mint from AI and HPC services.
A couple of weeks back, Iris Energy (NASDAQ:IREN) announced that it had entered a partnership with WEKA to “… optimize generative AI workloads…”
The announcement (which you can read here) explains that it’ll use WEKA’s platform, but provide the AI-grunt from the Iris Energy data centres.
It’s not the first bitcoin miner to do this, and I don’t expect it will be the last either.
With the crypto market heating up, and with AI entering what can only be described as mania-levels, looking to companies that can tap into both trends might be worth taking a deeper and closer look at.
AI Gone Wild 🤪
The interwebs were abuzz last week with the release of what many were calling the “iPhone moment” for AI devices.
In the last couple of weeks I’ve touched upon about the direction that AI devices are likely taking.
Last week I also explained the way in which it seemed like OpenAI was following the path of Apple towards an eventual AI consumer device.
And when I head to CES in Las Vegas in January 2024, the world’s biggest consumer technology show, I expect AI devices and the AI theme to dominate proceedings.
But right now, the big thing in AI devices is the “AI pin” from hu.ma.ne.
You can view the video of the release of the “pin” on the link above, but here’s what they look like in a media-kit image:
You put the pin on your clothes somewhere and it does all this fancy stuff for you. Again, I’d just go check out the video which explains it all.
The core tech though is the AI operating system.
It all seems nice on the balance of things. It looks good, no doubt about that.
But, is it the “iPhone moment” for AI?
I think not.
In fact, I find this all rather stupid.
Much more PalmPilot than iPhone.
By that, I mean the tech is good, what it can do is great…
But it’s too early, too soon, and frankly not a game changer.
One of the things that made smartphone adoption so rapid was the fact you could see something. You had a screen.
The AI pin form hu.ma.ne has the ability to project information onto your palm as you can see below:
There’s only one problem with it.
Cats.
That’s right. Cats.
One of the great things about the internet is cats. Cats and cat videos were arguably part of the reason the internet become so big.
How you gunna watch cat videos on your palm?
Just think about it. You’re on a train into work on the morning commute. You missed last night’s episode of I’m a Celebrity so you head to ITVX to catch up.
Are you telling me that a few billion people are going to watch celebrities eating camel penis on their palms?
I think you know the answer.
What will make an AI device abundant and ubiquitous is how you can connect AI to what you see. I believe that only comes through augmented reality and mixed reality.
It comes through Apple’s venture into VR/XR glasses which it’s done with Apple Vision Pro. Now, Vision Pro is too big, too expensive, and too weird looking. But it’s the right direction.
If Apple improves that form factor by about 100 times, then maybe we’re looking at a device that really changes how society works, like the smartphone did.
Until then, AI pins are interesting and novel, but they’re no world beater, no game changer, and will likely be confined to the realms of great tech that never quite made it…
Boomers & Busters 💰
AI and AI-related stocks moving and shaking up the markets this week. (All performance data below over the rolling week).
Boom 📈
Lantern Pharma (NASDAQ:LTRN) up 15%
Brainchip Holdings (ASAX:BRN) up 8%
Dotdigital Group (LSE:DOTD) up 7%
Bust 📉
Veritone (NASDAQ:VERI) down 36%
Bigtincan (ASX:BTH) down 21%
GuardforceAI (NASDAQ:GFAI) down 16%
From the hive mind 🧠
Imaging owning and creating a trillion dollar company and still being petrified of failure. Here’s what Jensen Huang of Nvidia thinks about it.
Samsung is going full-AI too – finally they’re starting to show us what that looks like.
A lot of people seem to be “The Godfather” of AI – here’s another, Geoffrey Hinton but in an excellent long form piece.
In the Netherlands they’ve figured out you can make hospitals better using AI. Here’s how.
Artificial Polltelligence 🗳️ : The Results Show
Last week’s poll was about AI-stocks. There are a few AI-specific stocks on the market, that are rolling out AI as a core product or service to their customer bases.
We were curious as to whether the investment community reflected the momentum building behind AI stocks.
So we asked a simple question, do you own any AI-specific stocks in your portfolio?
Well, we tallies up the votes…and…the winner is…
No!
Admittedly we’re a bit surprised by that…but the no’s took it out, and the obligatory proof is below:
This has got us thinking, and on Thursday you’ll see our next poll, which we think you might be keenly interested in. Make sure to come back on Thursday to check it out!
Weirdest AI image of the day
ChatGPT quote of the day
Artificial intelligence will reach human levels by around 2029. Follow that out further to, say, 2045, we will have multiplied the intelligence, the human biological machine intelligence of our civilization a billion-fold." - Ray Kurzweil
Thanks for reading, see you on Thursday (and don’t forget to leave your comments below)
Sam Volkering
Editor-in-Chief
AI Collision
