United States-based multinational technology company Nvidia has said that cryptocurrencies do not “bring anything useful for society.”
Michael Kagan, the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Nvidia has compared the usefulness of cryptocurrency to that of the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT. According to Kagan, the benefit of the latter in terms of processing power is more worthwhile than that of mining cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (BTC) and Dogecoin (DOGE).
The U.S. chip maker has never really been open-minded towards digital assets even though its processors were once used extensively for crypto mining.
Almost two years ago, Ether miners were artificially restricted from leveraging the Nvidia graphic cards for their mining operations via the release of software. Nvidia claimed that it instructed the restriction so that the supply of graphic cards would go to its preferred customers.
Is ChatGPT More Useful Than Crypto?
Speaking to The Guardian, Kagan said “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 eventually it collapsed, because it doesn’t bring anything useful for society. AI does,”
“With ChatGPT, everybody can now create his own machine, his own programme: 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’.”
Notably, about 10,000 Nvidia graphics cards were used in the design of the first version of ChatGPT.
Kagan went ahead to reflect on the difference in his time at Mellanox, the company he founded before it was acquired by Nvidia. His comparison was more focused in crypto trading and high-frequency trading. Based on his statement, Wall Street traders were acquiring his company’s products to save a couple of nanoseconds on the ‘wire’.
“the banks were doing crazy things like pulling the fibres under the Hudson taut to make them a little big shorter, to save a few nanoseconds between their datacentre and the stock exchange,” he said
Amidst all of these past achievements, the Nvidia CTO still holds the opinion that it is not likely for crypto to do anything good for humanity.
