Why Nvidia’s CTO is wrong on Crypto OR How Crypto Made AI – Trustnodes

If your presentation is struggling to get much attention among all the events, especially with banks, mentioning crypto is still a somewhat easy way to get some of the attention.

And then shortly after a 78 minute presentation by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang last week, where he touched on promises to bring 2 nanometer chips among many other things, we get Nvidia CTO Michael Kagan going on the Guardian to bash crypto.

“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 it finally collapsed, because it doesn’t bring anything useful to society. AI does,” Kagan said.

Of course, we could claim sour grapes after ethereum kicked out not only Nvidia, but all hardware-based mining through the upgrade to Proof of Stake.

It was a slightly different tune that time, but there’s a far more serious point to make, one you’d expect someone like Kagan to be very aware of.

As it happens, there is a very little-known connection, and a rather fundamental one, between crypto and AI.

In fact, one could even argue that the AI ​​we’re seeing now is because of crypto, at least considering it’s out at this point instead of much later.

To make that point, we have someone far more credible than Kagan, someone behind that AI. And it’s none other than Google co-founder Sergey Brin.

In a letter to investors back in 2018, which puzzled us at the time but was the first sign of things to come, Brin said:

“There are several factors at play in this computing boom… The second factor is greater demand from the GPU-friendly proof-of-work algorithms found in some of today’s leading cryptocurrencies, such as Ethereum.

The profound revolution in machine learning that has been built over the last decade is both enabled by these increasingly powerful processors and is also the main driver for their further development.”

It is common to forget that the crypto space is basically raw code, and the hardware that runs that code.

We drove GPUs through the demand, sometimes extraordinary demand, to be far more powerful. Equally important, we incentivized many talented men and women – or even “kids” – around the world to play and tinker with GPUs to make them as efficient as possible to gain a mining edge.

As it happens, these GPUs are also useful for other things, like machine learning or ChatGPT models, but these aren’t really things “kids” can play with, or smart young men who don’t run global companies anyway.

You needed enormous resources, certainly in 2018, to develop these models and train them, limiting what could be called open and global participation.

Unlike crypto, the cost was the GPU you use to play games, which you can send to mine, and google to see how it can be made more efficient, and so you get a whole global community focused on promoting GPUs , and then you get the likes of Brin or Sam Altman using these advances to now give us Stackoverflow on steroids.

About three months after Brin made the above comments, he went to a crypto gathering where he stated that innovations in this area, such as zero-knowledge proofs, were “amazing.”

It is pure mathematics in many ways and has specific applications in this area of ​​scaling public blockchains through other layers, but what wider applications it may have in the coming years remains to be seen.

Zk-tech also needs hardware, like asics, but to a far lesser extent than a public blockchain, but the demand for bitcoin mining asics has also led to some advances in semiconductors.

In both cases, it is through opening up these areas. For asics far more directly as crypto-focused startups started designing and manufacturing specialized asics hardware, while for the GPU duopoly more indirectly as far as the public getting an incentive to tinker with the hardware.

It has benefited all activities that rely on GPUs, and so the beginning of some version of public AI has crypto to some extent to thank.

Of course, when someone like Kagen says that crypto is not useful, he is not concerned with these finer details.

For him, first and foremost, he is likely worried about investors who worry that the overnight disappearance of the ethereum GPU market could affect Nvidia’s profits.

But more generally, these blind biased individuals are frankly more concerned with ignorance. Either they don’t care to be informed even about areas related to their business, or they find it easier to form cheap opinions about areas they know little about, or indeed in some cases they try to pull wool over you or audience.

Like, at least in terms of AI and advances in GPU as well as computing power, crypto has been very useful.