Sam Altman-Backed Rain AI Hires Apple Chip Vet to Lead Hardware

[ohong]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-06-28/sam-altman-backed-rain-ai-hires-apple-chip-vet-to-lead-hardware

[wslh]

It seems there are intersections with the history of PoW mining (CPU => GPUs => FPGAs => ASICs) since we don't need the full power of GPUs for training or inference. For example, ASICBoost [1][2][3] was/is a technique to improve PoW by ~20%.

[1] https://bitcoinops.org/en/topics/asicboost/

[2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1604.00575

[3] https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2017/04/06/bitcoins-new-con...

[OutOfHere → wslh]

Whether we do or don't need GPUs, we certainly don't need to be paying Nvidia a 9x markup over what it costs Nvidia to build the GPU.