Nvidia, the leading maker of graphics processing units (GPUs), has dismissed the value of cryptocurrencies for society, even as its chips are in high demand by the crypto industry.
The company’s chief technology officer, Michael Kagan, said that developing chatbots powered by artificial intelligence (AI) was a more meaningful use of its GPUs than crypto mining.
The company has always been wary of the crypto market. In 2021, it launched a software update that limited the mining efficiency of its GPUs for Ethereum, the second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap. The move was aimed at preserving its supply for its core customers, such as AI researchers and gamers.
Kagan defended the company’s choice to limit crypto mining on its GPUs, citing the low social impact of cryptocurrencies.
ChatGPT, the company’s flagship AI chatbot, was built on a supercomputer with about 10,000 Nvidia GPUs.
Kagan said that cryptocurrencies required parallel processing, which Nvidia excelled at, but they did not contribute anything useful to society. “AI does,” he said.
He added that ChatGPT enabled anyone to create their own machine and program. “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’.”
Kagan compared crypto to high-frequency trading, a sector that he was familiar with from his previous company, Mellanox, which Nvidia acquired.
He said that Mellanox supplied its products to Wall Street traders and banks who were obsessed with saving nanoseconds on their transactions. “They were doing crazy things like pulling the fibres under the Hudson taut to make them a little bit shorter,” he said.
He said he did not see any value in crypto for humanity. “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.”
Nvidia’s core business was making graphics cards for PC gamers, but it stumbled into the AI revolution by accident.
Its GPUs turned out to be ideal for the massive computing power required to train new AI systems, which could cost millions or billions of dollars.
Received message. A possible rewrite of the paragraph in the style of Forbes is: Kagan compared crypto to high-frequency trading, a sector that he was familiar with from his previous company, Mellanox, which Nvidia acquired. He said that Mellanox supplied its products to Wall Street traders and banks who were obsessed with saving nanoseconds on their transactions. “They were doing crazy things like pulling the fibres under the Hudson taut to make them a little bit shorter,” he said. He said he did not see any value in crypto for humanity. “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.”Nvidia’s core business was making graphics cards for PC gamers, but it stumbled into the AI revolution by accident. Its GPUs turned out to be ideal for the massive computing power required to train new AI systems, which could cost millions or billions of dollars.
Nvidia has secured major deals with Microsoft, Amazon and Oracle for its AI-focused GPUs, the A100 and H100. The chips are designed to power the cutting-edge applications of OpenAI and other AI innovators.
The company also offers its own cloud service, DGX, which charges $37,000 a month for a cluster of eight H100s.
At its annual conference last week, Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang said the company was driving “the iPhone moment of AI” and that its “generative AI” would “reinvent nearly every industry”.
However, the company faced a setback last year when its $40bn bid to acquire the UK-based Arm was blocked by regulators.
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