China’s Bitmain dominates Bitcoin mining, wants to cash in on AI

https://qz.com/1053799/chinas-bitmain-dominates-bitcoin-mining-now-it-wants-to-cash-in-on-artificial-intelligence/

by amelius • 9 years ago

139 58 9 years ago

pcr0• 9 years ago

Aren't machine learning workloads more variable than crypto mining? How would ASIC users cope with that?

matt4077• 9 years ago

The big advances in neural networks stem from the use of GPUs that are themselves less flexible than CPUs, but allow extremely good parallelisation of (some) linear algebra (mostly matrix multiplication). This seems like a logical next step, and it's probably similar to those "tensor processing units" of the newer Tesla chips and whatever Google's custom hardware was called.

hetspookjee• 9 years ago

Google indeed calls them Tensor Processing Units and NVIDIA used the name as well iirc, thus the birth of the TPU.

spupy• 9 years ago

Is that a spoiler for "The Three-Body Problem" in the second paragraph? Thanks, QZ!...

aaron-lebo2• 9 years ago

Had never heard of it, but it looks really interesting:

https://www.amazon.com/Three-Body-Problem-Cixin-Liu/dp/07653...

imaginenore• 9 years ago

Great book, somewhat unusual sci fi.

dankohn1• 9 years ago

Highly recommended. Sequel is quite good as well.

xinyhn• 9 years ago

I know everyone says it's good, etc. I just want to reinforce the point. It is really really good. Definitely one of the best scifi I have read. The story just gets bigger and bigger as the books progress as well as the imagined tech and physics. I know it's cliche but it definitely caused me to think slightly differently when looking up at a night sky.

sriacha• 9 years ago

Really, really good. I would rank it up in top scifi I've ever read.

raverbashing3• 9 years ago

Kinda.

It's not a major plot point that's being given away

It's more like "there's an Alien in Nostromo"

new299• 9 years ago

Errrr... I think it's a bigger give away than that. I came to the three body knowing almost nothing of what it was about... the information in the article would have removed much of the surprise.

pavel_lishin• 9 years ago

It's a minor plot point, and it's not even described accurately.

l5870uoo9y• 9 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three-Body_Problem

aaron-lebo2• 9 years ago

How great would it be if AI advances ended up controlled by an authoritarian Chinese government built off of the profits of libertarian Bitcoin users?

It's kind of fascinating just how dependent the value of cryptos and interest in them has been dependent upon China.

ojr• 9 years ago

are you also fascinated that many internet applications are dependent on data centers in America? I think it is more fascinating that I can build a crypto application on top of infrastructure built in another continent.

Tenoke• 9 years ago

How great would it be if AI advances ended up controlled by an authoritarian Chinese government built off of the profits of libertarian Bitcoin users?

Bitmain is a private company. And even if you can describe bitcoin as a libertarian technology, I wouldnt think that most of Bitmain's profits come from libertarians based on who uses their hardware.

It's kind of fascinating just how dependent the value of cryptos and interest in them has been dependent upon China.

Nothing special in the biggest part of the market dominating the price the most, really.

digitalzombie3• 9 years ago

I think most libertarian see it as libertarian because it is not issued by any government and so it isn't affected by gov when they change interest rate.

It is purely dictated by the market of supply and demand.

This is just what I think why Libertarian see it as libertarian; I'm not one in any real sense nor do I subscribe to any of Ayn Rand's reasoning.

pdog• 9 years ago

[Bitmain] has over 70% of the market for bitcoin mining rigs—effectively providing 70% of all the processing power on the network.

It's incredible that one company accounts for the vast majority of the entire Bitcoin network's hash rate.

loserboss• 9 years ago

Can't they now take over the market and generate bitcoin until everything crashes?

Mtinie2• 9 years ago

In this case, no. They produce ~70% of the hardware used by other miners. If they kept the hardware inhouse it would be another story all together.

If history is an indication, selling the "shovels" to others during this digital gold rush is more lucrative for Bitmain than mining would be.

digitalzombie3• 9 years ago

The story talked about how they survived the 2013 crash or something.

Also IIRC, digital currency is base on how much someone is willing to pay for it. If you own 90% of bitcoin and the rest own 10%, then wouldn't it be useless? I mean I'm not force to use bit coin I can just use real money if it's so hard to get bitcoin. There aren't that many people who are deeply invested in bit coin with a 90-10. The whole thing is kinda base on greed...

elif• 9 years ago

As others have said they sell a lot of miners but their pool is the largest at 25%. If they did push 50%, even getting there, let alone the potential manipulations, could only be for negative outcomes. McDonalds could destroy the beef industry... But why?

CyberDildonics2• 9 years ago

No. They don't actually control that much hash rate. Either the article is confusing the sales of their mining units to other miners or is outright wrong. If they really controlled that much of the hash rate, they would have activated emergent consensus to increase the max block size. They would have gotten around core and all their toxic censorship and bitcoin cash would never have needed to create a fork to get reasonable throughput.

sbenitoj• 9 years ago

Even if they could, why would they destroy an absolutely MASSIVE income stream, it goes completely counter to their own economic incentives.

__s• 9 years ago

Zipf's Law

raverbashing3• 9 years ago

I wonder what's the effect of the Big Firewall on connecting to the btc network

pas• 9 years ago

There was a block propagation study. Not much. The latency itself is the issue, but propagation time should/could be amortized.

https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/42378/how-releva...

socialist_coder2• 9 years ago

Is it that hard to believe? If you make the best X in your market, it's gonna be the most popular. 70% market share isn't so abnormal.

If you're digging for gold and there are 5 different shovels you can buy, but 1 is clearly the best, is it that hard to believe that 70% of all shovels in use will be that best one?

digitalzombie3• 9 years ago

Good.

Nvidia stuff 1080ti cost too much for a graduated student.

AMD is working on their own stuff supposely later this quarter we'll get tensorflow and other support on their card.

Google's TPU is not for consumer, only for cloud.

If bitmain can sell ASIC for consumer with reasonable price and support tensorflow, pytorch, etc... then it'll be good for the deep learning community.

bpicolo3• 9 years ago

I suspect they'd be designing for datacenters rather than consumers. That's essentially what they already do with bitcoin rigs too. It's a rented mining cloud.

jameskegel• 9 years ago

rented mining cloud

Would you like to rephrase this to something more accurate?

jstanley• 9 years ago

It's a rented mining cloud.

That's not all it is. They do sell actual hardware as well, which you then run yourself.

m3kw92• 9 years ago

A lot of the frameworks(keras, Theanos) uses Cuda close to the metal, so they would need to write alternative interfaces and the to be supported by these libraries

devy• 9 years ago

There are still a lot of software side of things we as a community can do in accelerating compute speed - for example, add OpenCL support for popular AI framework/libraries, which will leverage existing hardware and non-Nivida GPUs' power.

[1] https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/issues/22

du_bing• 9 years ago

Incredible story, thanks for sharing!

scottlegrand2• 9 years ago

Just last week I was saying that the AI gold rush needed its own version of "Bitboys Oy!" to add comic relief and occasionally good ideas. After all, you can't spell Bitmain without A I.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitBoys

m3kw92• 9 years ago

The issue with ASIC is that when there is new AI algorithms that gets developed, they may not be even able to use those. General purpose hardware will be able to. You are stuck and need to upgrade.

tachyonbeam• 9 years ago

Depends what the ASIC does. The bulk of deep learning is still matrix multiplication and scalar operations on matrices. GPUs are, as the name implies, general-purpose. They aren't as optimized as they could be for optimal performance on matrix ops. This is part of what Google is capitalizing on with the TPU.

Further speedups can be gained by going with lower precision ops (eg: float16). A chip specialized for deep learning could support f16 only, which would allow it to have more compute power using less area and less power.

So, in short, there are ways to make ASICs that are more efficient for deep learning while still giving the ASICs flexibility. ASIC doesn't mean there is no programmability.

zakk• 9 years ago

GPUs are, as the name implies, general-purpose.

???

China’s Bitmain dominates Bitcoin mining, wants to cash in on AI

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