The damping effect is that part of your costs are the hardware, space, depreciation etc. leaving that stuff idle costs money - so it makes sense to mine in the less profitable periods too.
That depends on each miner's energy costs, so long as (variable cost of energy - revenue from coins) < fixed costs. It's still negative cashflow either way, but the monthly losses have to be weighed against the cost of going insolvent and losing the hardware.
Crypto-miners are switching to AI token farming when bitcoin is low. They have compute that's both installed and powered, so why not do what pays better?
Training ASICs (like Google’s TPUs) can generally run inference too, since inference is a subset of training computations. TPUs are widely used for both.
Mining ASICs (Bitcoin, etc.) cannot be repurposed…they’re hardwired for a single hash algorithm and lack matrix math needed for neural networks.
