Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications such as ChatGPT and Google Bard are of more benefit to society than cryptocurrency mining, according to Nvidia’s Chief Technology Officer, Michael Kagan.
Kagan revealed that the company has been attempting to limit the utilization of its RTX-30 graphics chips for mining, and that it never gave its full endorsement to the crypto industry. “People used our GPUs for this purpose,” Kagan said to the Guardian (opens new tab). “They purchased a lot of stuff, but it doesn’t really do anything meaningful for society. AI does.”
Despite Nvidia’s negative attitude regarding crypto, the company has undoubtedly profited from the Bitcoin and Ethereum bull market. Many miners have likely bought Nvidia GPUs in order to mine digital currencies.
Kagan further commented on the matter: “I never believed that [crypto] is something that will do something good 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.”
Fueling the Revolution
OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, used 10,000 of Nvidia’s GPUs to train the model, according to UBS analyst Timothy Arcuri. At present, tens of thousands of A100 and H100 Tensor Core GPUs are employed for managing training and inference for AI models by Microsoft’s Azure cloud service.
Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, said that the company’s GPUs provide the power for the “iPhone moment of AI” at the company’s annual conference last week.
