sorry, github blocked the account just now. guess they think trying to pump a scam coin or smth like that. (to be clear, this is an experimental repo, coins are not for sale etc)
I reuploaded to this different account:
https://github.com/nf-dj/tenscoinGitHub is being weird here, when obviously fake/shady repo about Bitcoin wallet rarely removed.
So mining doesn't produce useful work directly in itself. It's just that if someone optimizes the hw and infra to mine this pow (designs custom chip, memory etc), it aligns with the same type of computation needed for AI (bc deep learning etc is based on same type of deep rounds of matmults).
Meaning the same hw/infra can be reused (but not at the same time as mining, bc the pow uses random weight matrices seeded from the block header). Imo still a benefit compared to all the effort and energy going into sha256 mining, and should be relatively simple to implement, but any feedback welcome.
I think i get your point now. Price of old mining ASIC (which have lower efficient) is much lower than it's initial price, but i see people willing to buy/rent older generation of CPU/GPU. But in practice, hardware which can be re-purposed for AI/ML operation alone isn't enough. People want good software support, which is reason Nvidia GPU is extremely popular when hardware dedicated for AI/ML exists.