Nvidia, a leading US chip maker, has come out to address the value of cryptocurrencies and confirm that the company does not view them as bringing anything “useful” to society. Michael Kagan, the company’s chief technology officer, made a statement making this clear, further indicating that research and development into the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and conversational-based chatbots was far more valuable than crypto mining.
It is clear that the company has never been overly enthusiastic about its involvement in the crypto sector. This year, they even took steps to limit the use of their graphics cards in this arena with the release of a software that was tailored to prevent as much of their other hardware from being used to mine popular Ethereum-based cryptocurrency.
Kagan furthered his stance, saying that while the company’s products were being used extensively by the crypto industry, extracting power from the company’s high-performance processors had an overall limited value to society. On the other hand, using the same power in a technology set such as AI-based chatbot like ChatGPT had tremendous possibilities.
The first version of ChatGPT used a supercomputer built around Nvidia’s AI graphics cards. With AI, there is great personalizable value – one is able to use the technology to give instructions to the program, and if it does not respond as desired, the instructions can be revised until the desired result is achieved.
Kagan characterized the use of crypto almost similarly to high-frequency trading and noted that despite the amount of business Nvidia had garnered, he felt the development did not bring any tangible benefits to society other than money making.
AI, on the other hand, has seen skyrocketing patronage of Nvidia GPU-powered products. In 2021, the company sold 20,000 H100s to Amazon AWS to support its cloud computing needs, 16,000 to Oracle and even Microsoft purchased an impressive tens of thousands of A100 GPUs to drive the open AI project to success.
Nvidia is credited with being the backbone behind the development of AI, as their simple yet powerful processors were perfectly suited to the computationally challenging training needed for AI work. Jensen Huang, the chipmaker’s chief executive, expressed his confidence that the AI-related products of his company would ‘reinvent industry’, further cementing the view of the technology as the ‘iPhone moment’ of AI.
When it comes to technology and innovation, Nvidia have always delivered on their promises. Led by the leadership of Kagan, they have been at the vanguard of the AI revolution, and have made sure that their resources are dedicated to the right sectors and projects. It is clear that the company has made the right call by focusing more on the development of useful AI technology, instead of investing in crypto mining.
