NVIDIA, a world-class chipmaker for graphical processing units (GPUs), said in a report that cryptocurrencies did not “bring anything useful for society.”
NVIDIA’s chief technology officer, Michael Kagan, told the Guardian that innovations using its processing technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) programme ChatGPT were better than people mining cryptocurrencies.
He added: “All this crypto stuff, it needed parallel processing, and [Nvidia] is the best, so people just programmed it to use for this purpose. They bought a lot of stuff, and then eventually it collapsed, because it doesn’t bring anything useful for society. AI does.”
His comments come as numerous mining groups have begun using NVIDIA’s graphics cards to process cryptocurrencies. Continuing, he stated that ChatGPT allowed all users to create their own machines.
“You just tell it what to do, and it will. And if it doesn’t work the way you want it to, you tell it ‘I want something different’,” he added.
Continuing, Kagan explained that cryptocurrencies were similar to high-frequency trading, which he worked with at his former company Mellanox before NVIDIA bought out the firm.
He told the Guardian: “We were heavily involved in also trading: people on Wall Street were buying our stuff to save a few nanoseconds on the wire, the banks were doing crazy things like pulling the fibres under the Hudson taut to make them a little [bit] shorter, to save a few nanoseconds between their datacentre and the stock exchange.”
Concluding, he stated that he never believed that cryptocurrencies were “something that will do something good for humanity.”
“You know, people do crazy things, but they buy your stuff, you sell them stuff. But you don’t redirect the company to support whatever it is,” Kagan said.
The news comes after NVIDIA began restricting computing power to discourage people from mining Ethereum and allow customers to receive its GPUs for AI, gaming, and research. ChatGPT began on a supercomputer with roughly 10,000 graphics cards from the Santa Clara-based firm.
