CoreWeave's Brian Venturo (CTO) and Brannin McBee (CSO) return to On The Brink for a discussion of their journey through the merge and beyond. In this episode:  Are they relieved that the merge finally happened? Will there be some form of non-Bitcoin PoW in the future? Could Ethereum conceivably return to PoW? The effect of PoS on ETH’s censor resistance What quantity of ETH miners shifted to other PoW chains and what portion went elsewhere? What is the best use of capital for former ETH miners now? Did the merge really reduce global electricity consumption by 0.2%? Brannin’s estimate for precise electricity reduction from the merge How feasible is it for former ETH miners to get into GPU clouds? How Core Weave built their cloud product What it takes to be competitive in the high performance computing sector Why the generalized providers of cloud can’t just win when it comes to rendering and ML/AI Why the HPC market is exploding right now How open source communities behind text and image models contributed to the explosion in use cases The importance of Stable Diffusion versus Open AI The explosive growth of Stable Diffusion and Stability AI How the growth in infrastructure contributed to the emergence of these newer image models New directions in AI models like video creation Will generative AI be attacked by environmentalists? Can cloud data centers handle interruptible loads like Bitcoin miners can? How industrial compute will play a role in emerging metaverses Use cases Brannin and Brian are excited about Why hardware is actually a constraint to the number of metaverse users today Learn more about CoreWeave here.