Nvidia CTO declares crypto “doesn’t bring anything useful to society” – Cryptopolitan
Nvidia, an American chipmaker, has expressed its view that cryptocurrencies do not “bring anything useful to society”, despite the fact that the company’s powerful processors have sold in large quantities in the crypto sector. Chief Technology Officer Michael Kagan has argued that the use of processing power such as the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT is more beneficial than cryptocurrency mining. Nvidia has not welcomed crypto miners with open arms; in 2021, it released software that restricted the ability of its graphics cards to be used to mine Ethereum, ensuring that its preferred customers, such as AI researchers and gamers, had access to the cards instead.
Kagan argued that the decision to move away from cryptocurrency mining was justified due to its limited value. ChatGPT version one was trained on a supercomputer consisting of approximately 10,000 Nvidia graphics cards. “Crypto mining only required parallel processing, which Nvidia is known for,” Kagan explained. “They bought a lot, but in the end it was not seen as beneficial to the community. With ChatGPT, anyone can now create their own machine and program it to do whatever they want. If the results are not satisfactory, you can simply say that “I want something else.”
Before the acquisition by Nvidia, Mellanox, a company founded by Kagan, had seen great success in the high-frequency trading industry. Kagan commented, “We were heavily involved in trading; people on Wall Street bought our products to save a few nanoseconds on the wire.
The banks even took extreme measures, such as tightening the fibers under the Hudson River to shorten the distance between the data center and the exchange.” However, Kagan did not believe that cryptocurrency was something that would do humanity any good. “People do crazy things,” he said, “but they still buy your stuff. But don’t divert the company to support whatever it is.”
Originally known for providing powerful graphics cards to empower PC gamers with cutting-edge gaming capabilities, it was by chance that Nvidia’s offerings took a central role in the AI revolution. The massively computationally intensive process of training a new AI system, which can cost billions of dollars in computing power, was found to be significantly more efficient when done with the relatively simple but powerful processors that had been adopted by players.
At its annual conference last week, Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s CEO, declared the company the driving force behind the “iPhone moment of AI.” He also expressed that this “generative AI” would have a significant impact in almost every industry. Two weeks before, Microsoft had bought tens of thousands of Nvidia’s AI-focused A100 GPUs from OpenAI.
In addition, Amazon had obtained 20,000 of the H100 successor chips for its cloud computing AWS service, and another 16,000 have been purchased by Oracle. Nvidia also provides rental access to the chips through its DGX cloud service, which starts at a rate of just under $37,000 (£30,250) a month for eight H100s connected in a “cluster”. Unfortunately, Nvidia’s $40 billion takeover of British tech company Arm fell through due to regulatory issues.
