Unlike AI applications like Chatgpt, cryptocurrencies are “good for nothing,” the head of US chipmaker Nvidia believes. The comments come despite the company’s significant sales in the sector, where its powerful processors are widely used to mint digital coins.
Chatbot Development More Valuable Than Crypto Mining, Nvidia Exec Claims
According to a high-ranking executive at Nvidia, a leading manufacturer of graphics processing units (GPUs), cryptocurrency “doesn’t bring anything useful to society.” This executive expressed this opinion despite the fact that his company sells a large volume of video cards to the industry.
Other uses of processing power, such as those associated with artificial intelligence (AI) applications likeChatgptchatbots, are more valuable than mining crypto, Michael Kagan, Nvidia’s chief technology officer, told Guardian Guardian.
U.S. tech companies, which are also major suppliers of AI hardware and software, are less enthusiastic about the crypto market: two years ago, they tried to limit the use of their GPUs to mint ether (ETH), the second-largest cryptocurrency popular among miners at the time. The company tried to limit the use of its GPUs to minting ether (
Kagan argued that this decision to ensure sufficient supply for Nvidia’s priority customers, including gamers and AI researchers, was justified because of the limited value of using powerful processors to extract the digital currency.
“We programmed Nvidia to use them for that because we need parallel processing to handle crypto and Nvidia is the best. As a result, it bought a lot of stuff and eventually collapsed. Because it doesn’t bring anything beneficial to society; AI does,” Kagan explained.
“With Chatgpt, everyone can create their own machine, their own program. The first version of the chatbot was actually trained on Nvidia’s supercomputer, which consists of about 10,000 GPUs, the newspaper said.
Microsoft recently announced that it had purchased tens of thousands of Nvidia’s A100 GPUs for AI for Openai, the software giant’s Chatgpt developer. Nvidia also sold 20,000 of its successor, the H100 chip, for Amazon’s AWS cloud service, and another 16,000 to Oracle, the British daily detailed.
Nvidia similarly rents access to the chips through its DGX cloud service and is involved in other AI projects. At its annual conference last week, CEO Jensen Huang referred to the company as the engine behind “the iPhone moment of AI” and predicted that Nvidia’s “generative AI” would “revolutionize almost every industry.”
While competing for resources like those offered by Nvidia, cryptocurrencies and artificial intelligence are likely to intersect more frequently in the future. Last week, US crypto exchange Coinbase announced that it had tested Chatgpt as a tool for pre-listing risk assessment of tokens and said the results warranted further investigation.
Image Credits: Shutterstock, Pixabay, Wiki Commons, Michael Vi / Shutterstock.com.