Nvidia says ‘Cryptocurrencies don’t bring anything useful for society

The US chipmaker Nvidia has said that cryptocurrencies do not bring anything useful for society despite the powerful processors selling in huge quantities to the sector.

Michael Kagan, the company's chief technology officer, said other uses of processing power such as the Chatbot ChatGPT were more worthwhile than mining criptocurrency.

Nvidia never embraced the community with open arms. In 2021, the company released software that restricted the ability to use its graphics cards from being used to mine the popularEthereumCryptocurrencies in an effort to ensure supply went to its preferred customers, which include AI researchers and gamers.

Kagan said the decision was justified because of the limited value of using processing power to mine cryptocurrencies.

The first version of ChatGPT was trained on a supercomputer made up of about 10,000 Nvidia graphics cards.

It needed parallel processing, and Nvidia was the best, so people just programmed it to use for this purpose. They bought a lot of stuff, but eventually collapsed because it didn't bring anything useful for society. Kagan told the Guardian that AI does.

Everyone can now create his own machine, his own program with ChatGPT: tell it what you want to do, and it will. If it doesn't work the way you want it to, you tell it I want something different, by contrast, it's an industry that had led to a lot of business for Mellanox, the company that Kagan founded before it was acquired by Nvidia.

He said that people in Wall Street were buying their 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 shorter, to save a few nanoseconds between their datacentre and the stock exchange.

I have never believed that cryptocurrencies will do good for humanity. People do crazy things, but they buy your stuff, you sell them stuff. You don't redirect the company to support whatever it is. Nvidia's products took their place at the heart of the AI boom, despite the fact that it was best known for producing powerful graphics cards for PC gamers to play the latest games.

The computationally intensive work of training a new AI system that can take millions of dollars-worth of computing power, happened significantly faster on the types of simple yet powerful processors that had been adopted by gamers.

Two weeks ago, Microsoft said it had bought tens of thousands of Nvidia s AI-focused processors, the A 100 GPU, in order to power the workload of OpenAI. Nvidia sold 20,000 H 100 s, the successor to that chip, to Amazon for its cloud computing AWS service, and another 16,000 have been sold to Oracle.

Nvidia also rents access to the chips directly with its DGX cloud service starting at just under $37,000 30,250 a month for just eight H 100 wired together in a cluster. Speaking at the company's annual conference last week, Jensen Huang, Nvidia's chief executive, said the company was the engine behind the iPhone moment of AI and said Nvidia's $40 billion takeover of the UK-based tech firm Arm collapsed because of regulatory difficulties.