Cryptocurrencies do not “bring anything useful for society”, claims the chief technology officer of graphics card giant Nvidia.

Nvidia is a huge player in the cryptocurrency space, with crypto miners frequently causing mass GPU shortages. Despite its popularity amongst miners, Nvidia has never fully embraced the practice and in 2021 released software which artificially constrained the ability for users to mine Ethereum to ensure stocks remained for gamers and AI researchers.

In comments to The Guardian, Nvidia chief technology officer Michael Kagan said that the company is more oriented on AI development and criticised the heavy investment in crypto mining.

He said: “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.

“I never believed that [crypto] is 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.”

The tech chief went on to say that the first version of the AI chatbot ChatGPT was trained on a supercomputer made up of around 10,000 Nvidia graphics cards. He added: “With ChatGPT, everybody can now create his own machine, his own programme: 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’.”

Microsoft recently announced the purchase of tens of thousands of Nvidia’s AI-oriented A100 GPUs to power ChatGPT. Nvidia has also recently sold 20,000 H100s to AWS to power its cloud computing servers.

Share Story: