In a recent interview with The Guardian, Nvidia’s CTO criticised their GPUs being used for cryptocurrency mining – while they are better used for more worthwhile tasks like AI.
This is unexpected citing how well Nvidia made its fortune from selling its cards to crypto enthusiasts, but still calling them useless purpose. He noted that cryptocurrencies bring no value to society, and thus collapsed.
Cryptocurrencies Bring No Value to the Society
In an intriguing revelation, Nvidia’s CTO Micheal Kagan said their company’s GPUs can be better used for more worthwhile tasks than mining crypto, like running AI-based technologies. He noted this in an interview with The Guardian, saying;
“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 TO society. AI does.”
He also praised ChatGPT for letting anyone create anything of their own by just asking the platform. “And if it doesn’t work the way you want it to, you tell it ‘I want something different’.” Further, he referenced Wall Street’s use of their GPUs, where people are pouring in hundreds of dollars to buy their cards to save a few nanoseconds on the wire.
Though Nvidia made a good fortune by selling its cards for crypto mining, it never disclosed how much money it made from them to the point – leading to a hefty penalty of $5.5 million from the SEC last year. But for AI processing, it’s the backbone for such tasks.
OpenAI admitted training its ChatGPT on a supercomputer Microsoft built from tens of thousands of Nvidia A100 GPUs. And with Microsoft’s investment of $10 billion into OpenAI, the duo is now preparing to use Nvidia’s H100 GPUs for the improvement of their AI technologies soon.
