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.

Everybody who is getting into Deep Learning is facing the same issue. It needs a GPU to train their models on them or they will grow old until they will see any output out of their beloved project (of course there are cloud options, but for hobbyists, it is not the same as developing on your own PC). But, unfortunately, GPUs are very expensive. Nowadays, all PC components are expensive, but the GPUs are the ones that empty your pockets. This is mostly a by-product of mining cryptocurrencies.

Two years ago, a Chinese chip-design expert named Micree Zhan was reading China's seminal science-fiction novel, The Three-Body Problem, by Liu Cixin, while wrestling with how to create a new processor. He had already designed custom chips for the company he co-founded, Bitmain, that had made it into the world's leading bitcoin miner, allowing it to dominate the new, hyper-competitive industry of unearthing bitcoins. Now he needed a chip that could launch Bitmain onto a new trajectory, one that would help it master a world-altering technology called deep learning, a branch of artificial intelligence. While performing his nightly meditation, a practice he has kept up for nearly a decade, it suddenly came to Zhan. "It was late at night, and something inspired me--Sophon!" he recalls. A sophon is a fictional proton-sized supercomputer from The Three-Body Problem that is sent by an alien civilization to halt scientific progress on Earth. The aliens use it to take over Earth when their own planet is destroyed by the chaotic gravitational forces of its three suns.