As artificial intelligence (AI) rapidly works its complex magic on one sector of the economy after another, there is an increasingly pressing need for compute resources to power all this machine intelligence. Training a model like ChatGPT costs more than $5 million, and running the early ChatGPT demo, even before usage increased to its current level, costs OpenAI around $100,000 per day. And AI is more than just text generation; applying AI to practical problems across multiple industries requires similar large neural models trained on a diversity of data types -- medical, financial, customer information, geospatial and so forth. Moving beyond the limitations of current neural net AI toward systems with higher levels of artificial general intelligence will almost surely be even more compute intensive. It's only natural that a small but increasing number of crypto miners are now looking at how to leverage their own compute infrastructures to help push forward the AI revolution.

Demand for some of Nvidia's chips has been so hot that it has outpaced the company's ability to increase production, adding to chip-supply shortages riling the semiconductor industry. Nvidia's newest graphics cards were a holiday sensation, Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress said during an earnings call. She added that some inventories are likely to remain low in the first quarter even as Nvidia increases supply. "Throughout our supply chain, stronger demand globally has limited the availability of capacity and components," Ms. Kress said. President Biden on Wednesday signed an executive order directing a broad review of supply chains for semiconductors and other critical materials.

Computer scientists have developed a new artificial intelligence (AI) system that may be able to identify malicious codes that hijack supercomputers to mine for cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin and Monero. "Based on recent computer break-ins in Europe and elsewhere, this type of software watchdog will soon be crucial to prevent cryptocurrency miners from hacking into high-performance computing facilities and stealing precious computing resources," said Gopinath Chennupati, a researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory and co-author of a new paper in the journal IEEE Access. "Our deep learning artificial intelligence model is designed to detect the abusive use of supercomputers specifically for the purpose of cryptocurrency mining." Legitimate cryptocurrency miners often assemble enormous computer arrays dedicated to digging up the digital cash. Less savory miners have found they can strike it rich by hijacking supercomputers, provided they can keep their efforts hidden.

Microsoft's antivirus and malware division recently opened the bonnet on a malicious mutating cryptocurrency miner. The Washington-based big tech firm revealed how machine learning was crucial in putting a stop to it spreading further. According to the Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection team, a new malware dubbed Dexphot has been infecting computers since last year, but since June 2019 has been burning out thanks to machine learning. Dexphot used a number of techniques such as encryption, obfuscation layers, and randomized files names, to disguise itself and hijack legitimate systems. If successful, the malware would run a cryptocurrency miner on the device.

Seven long months after the next-generation "Volta" graphics architecture debuted in the Tesla V100 for data centers, the Nvidia Titan V finally brings the bleeding-edge tech to PCs in traditional graphics card form. But make no mistake: This golden-clad monster targets data scientists, with a tensor core-laden hardware configuration designed to optimize deep learning tasks. You won't want to buy this $3,000 GPU to play Destiny 2. But that doesn't mean we humble PC gamers can't glean information from Volta's current AI-centric incarnations. Here are five key things you need to know about the Titan V and Nvidia's Volta GPU. Editor's note: This article was originally published on May 11, 2017 but was updated on December 8 to include information from the Titan V. If you're looking for hot details about the future of GeForce graphics cards, well, keep waiting.