A senior representative of U.S. chip maker Nvidia has declared that compared with AI applications such as Chatgpt, cryptocurrencies do not hold any useful value. This statement comes despite his company’s significant sales in the crypto space, where its powerful processors are frequently used to generate digital coins.
Nvidia Top Executive: Chatbots are More Valuable than Crypto Mining
A high-ranking executive of Nvidia, a major manufacturer of graphics processing units (GPUs), has asserted that cryptocurrencies do not bring any practical gain to society. The comment was made despite his company’s sales to the crypto sector, where its powerful video cards are often utilized to mine digital coins.
Other uses of the same processing power, like those associated with artificial intelligence (AI) applications like the Chatgpt chatbot, are more worthwhile than crypto mining, Nvidia’s Chief Technology Officer Michael Kagan stated to the Guardian.
Two years ago, Nvidia tried to limit the use of its GPUs to mint ether (ETH), the second largest cryptocurrency, which was popular among miners at the time. Kagan insisted that the decision, which was meant to secure adequate supply for Nvidia’s favored customers — such as gamers and AI researchers among others — was justified due to the limited value of using the potent processors to extract digital currencies.
“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,” Kagan explained.
“With Chatgpt, everybody can now create their own machine, their own program: you just tell it what to do, and it will,” he elaborated. The chatbot’s first version was actually trained on a supercomputer composed of about 10,000 GPUs from Nvidia, the newspaper remarked.
Microsoft announced recently it had purchased tens of thousands of A100s, Nvidia’s AI-focused GPUs, for Openai, the developer of Chatgpt which the software giant funds. Nvidia also sold 20,000 units of its successor, the H100 chip, to Amazon for its cloud service, AWS, and another 16,000 to Oracle, the British daily detailed.
Nvidia rents access to the chips through its DGX cloud service as well, and is involved in other AI projects. During its annual conference last week, CEO Jensen Huang referred to the company as the engine behind “the iPhone moment of AI,” and predicted the Nvidia-powered “generative AI” would “reinvent nearly every industry.”
While they are competing for resources like those provided by Nvidia, cryptocurrencies and artificial intelligence are likely to merge more and more often in the future. Last week, U.S. crypto exchange Coinbase announced it had tested Chatgpt as a tool for pre-listing risk assessment of tokens and said the results deserved further investigation.
What is your opinion on the statements of the Nvidia tech executive regarding cryptocurrencies and artificial intelligence? Share your views on the matter in the comments section below.
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