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>>kcorbi+(OP)
One perspective I've been thinking about lately is how the rise of Crypto has been hugely beneficial for AI, in the same way that the dot-com bubble was hugely beneficial for the internet.

Essentially Crypto lead to huge investment into GPUs and GPU technology, and then once Crypto collapsed lead to a huge capacity of compute power which then decidedly was put into AI.

I doubt that investment into GPU technology would have been driven by the idea of AI alone. Something manic like Crypto had to drive it initially. Without Crypto, I imagine the AI revolution we're seeing today would not have taken place.

>>dottjt+8P
I disagree. Crypto sucked up the limited number of consumer GPUs in existence, and manufacturers weren’t willing to scale up production since they knew that when crypto crashed the demand would revert to the mean and all the mining GPUs would flood the market and body slam the price.

AFAIK the actual features of the GPU that are used to accelerate AI (fp16, int8 and mixed-precision tensor processing) had nothing to do with the features used by miners. And no miners were buying/financing-the-creation-of the class of server GPUs used by folks like OpenAI because they didn’t make financial sense for mining (we’re talking 10x the price of a high-end consumer GPU and nowhere near that increase in hashrate).