> “All this crypto stuff, it needed parallel processing, and [Nvidia] is the best, so people just programmed it to use for this purpose. They bought a lot of stuff, and then eventually it collapsed, because it doesn’t bring anything useful for society. AI does,” Kagan told the Guardian. No, the crypto mining industry collapsed because the largest GPU-mined cryptocurrency (Ethereum) removed the ability for people to m…
Absolutely correct.
At least cryptocurrencies like Ethereum found an alternative consensus method that is efficient and environmentally friendly, unlike what I am seeing in AI and deep neural networks for decades which that still has not changed with the way on how models continue to get larger and require more planet incinerating power and will currently require millions and in the future, billions of dollars to train. As long as they stay inefficient, Nvidia will continue smiling knowing that.
The end result is a pseduo-intelligent black box that confidently hallucinates and can get confused by a single bad input - rendering it useless. Once it all goes wrong, then it gets re-trained / fine-tuned again, wasting more energy. Inference requiring tons of GPUs is also wasteful and inefficient.
The moment we switch to better and efficient alternative in training deep neural networks at scale, that I would call a 'breakthrough' in AI rather than throwing more data, more GPUs at the problem.