The Conversation: Hive Technologies CEO Aydin Kilic is betting big on AI

Born and raised in East Vancouver, Aydin Kilic graduated with an honours degree in electronics engineering from SFU before joining Richmond tech giant Sierra Wireless. Around the recession of 2008, Kilic became involved in real estate, spending several years in that industry before co-founding Fortress Blockchain Corp. In 2021, he handed off leadership of Fortress to become the CEO of Vancouver-based Hive Technologies, one of the country’s leading cryptocurrency mining companies. The firm and its leading executive have a big vision for the future of AI and how it can impact everything we do. We met for coffee at the Vancouver Club.

There are still a lot of different opinions about cryptocurrency and bitcoin. There have been a lot of ups and downs. Where is it going to go next? You’re optimistic, I assume.

So we just went through the halving, right? What that means is that the block reward drops by half. Before the halving, the network made 900 bitcoin. Now it makes 450 bitcoin a day. All the miners in the world are competing for that same reward. So, if you’re 1 percent of the network, the pie is half the size. And, typically, nine to 12 months after the halving there’s a bull market.

That happened after the big fall in 2020. Do you remember where you were then?

Yeah, bitcoin fell to $3,500 on March 12, 2020. I was still running Fortress at the time. It was like a scene out of a movie. I remember swerving into a parking lot and getting out my phone and just pacing.

How did you survive that?

You know, it bottomed out and we made it through that fine. It was challenging: you run your analytics and you’re like, “Okay, we can afford to run it this long and we’re going to lose that much money.” Everything’s a calculated risk, right? But it was crazy. And then, what happened after the halving? In December, bitcoin started coming back to $10,000. In January 2021, it hit a new all-time high. By February, it was surging. I think bitcoin has finally reached critical mass. I don’t want to say it’s too big to fail, because that has a negative connotation. But I think now because of the widespread adoption of bitcoin, the regulators have finally wrapped their heads around it. The bitcoin ETFs in the U.S. and Hong Kong have recently been approved. People can buy it in those countries on the exchanges.

As someone who used to be in real estate in a city where prices have only gone up, does it worry you to be in an industry that feels a lot more unstable?

Well, there’s no such thing as zero. Unless you’re buying an alt coin that goes to 0.001 of a cent. But when you look at the history of the bitcoin price or of bitcoin mining economics, it’s volatile but there are floor values, especially on the mining economics. As long as you’re very astute and careful with your capital and you always keep enough in reserve and make sure your machines can run profitably.

What are you like as a leader? What would your employees say?

I think driven for sure. I’m an engineer CEO, so I’m very hands on.

Yeah, I’m getting that vibe.

And I love math and physics. I like to understand the relationships in the physical universe and how they can be described by equations. So one of our differentiating factors at Hive is that we have bespoke mathematical models that I’ve built and my extended team have used so that we can study bitcoin mining analytics at a level that I believe none of our peers are doing—and that’s given us an edge.

You have big hopes for AI and are trying to position Hive as Canada’s premier AI infrastructure provider, with data centres and cutting-edge Nvidia GPUs [graphics processing units]. Where is Vancouver in terms of the AI sector?

Well, Hive is a Vancouver company and we have data centres here, obviously. But the federal government recently announced a $2.4-billion grant for AI initiatives. And, not to get political, but we have so much talent here that I’d hope the provincial or even municipal governments could offer grants or business incentives to attract talent here or for businesses to invest their capital here and set up data centres here. Take Anthony von Mandl. He just opened a White Claw factory in South Carolina. It’s just so hard to do business here sometimes. I’m hoping we can foster innovation in B.C. because we do have a lot of talent here and you see that with companies like Microsoft and Amazon opening offices here. But those are big American conglomerates coming in and setting up offices because our engineers are cheaper. That’s not our government helping local businesses thrive.

What are your company’s plans with AI? How can you help others utilize it?

So, in the 1960s, IBM’s total addressable market was five computers worldwide. Back then, a computer would have been the size of a whole room. That’s what ChatGPT is right now: it’s this big, monolithic thing. The current version of ChatGPT is so big and complex that it took tens of thousands of GPUs. The training cost was in the eight figures. Now our phones are more powerful than the original IBM mainframe from the ’60s and they fit in our pockets.

So AI will become more specialized?

Exactly. It’s going to get smaller and smaller and more personalized and allow for ownership of data. That’s the future of AI, as I see it. Hive is going to allow enterprise-grade AI solutions for companies that we can enable by finding the best open-source large language models.

Can you give an example of what that might look like in practice?

So if you’re a law firm and have hundreds of millions of words of case law in your files, you can’t send that to ChatGPT. But what if you could train your own large language model that’s really smart on case law? You fine-tune the model on all the precedents and that lives on your servers—and a company like Hive, we can provision that for you. These are your servers; you have root access. We’ll load this model for you. We’ll help you fine-tune it. And that’s how companies are going to go to the next level.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Quick Hits

Pet peeve: Slow walkers and slow drivers

Hobby: Kickboxing, but now trying to get into tennis

Recent TV binge: Succession and Billions

Most memorable concert: Jensen Huang’s presentation for Nvidia GTC at the Sap Center in March 2024! It was a rock concert for nerds where he unveiled the future of Nvidia AI technology (Blackwell)

If I had a superpower, it would be: The ability to read minds

Favourite place in B.C.: Vancouver in the summer is the best place on earth

Last book I read: Good to Great by Jim Collins. Also want to shout out Your Oxygen Mask First by Kevin Lawrence