Exactly. I think we haven’t optimized for hardware cost much with LLM training. Crypto is kind of like that but taken to an extreme. There are some reasons why it’s not comparable (crypto mining is embarrassingly parallel, doesn’t need a lot of memory, tends to burn at least as much cost in electricity as on hardware, whereas LLM training is memory-bound, etc), but it shows kind of roughly what scrappy, hardcore computer hardware cost-optimization looks like at scale.
