Techspace - Considering the fact the company has sold a substantial amount of its formidable processors to the industry, US chipmaker Nvidia claims that cryptocurrencies have no positive social impact.
Chief Technology Officer Michael Kagan claimed that crypto mining is not as efficient as other uses of computing power, such as ChatGPT's artificial intelligence chatbot.
Nvidia's views on Cryptocurrencies
The world of cryptocurrencies has never gotten an enthusiastic reception from Nvidia. The company even released software in the year 2021 that artificially limited the use of its graphics cards for mining the digital currency Ethereum, a famous cryptocurrency, in an effort to ensure that the product only went to its target customers, which were artificial intelligence developers and gamers.
As a consequence of the limited usefulness of using processing power to mine cryptocurrencies, according to Michael Kagan, the decision to do so was reasonable. A powerful computer formed out of about 10,000 Nvidia graphics cards was put to use for instructing the initial iteration of ChatGPT.
Michael Kagan claimed that since [Nvidia] is the most effective it has been programmed to be used for this purpose since all of this crypto-currency stuff requires to be processed in parallel. They spend a lot of money on things that aren't helping the community in any manner whatsoever, so ultimately it all falls apart. AI doesn't appear to be such as that.
"With ChatGPT, everybody can now create his own machine, his own 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’," He continued.
The two largest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, Bitcoin and Ethereum, have increased in value recently, defying Kagan's statement that the crypto industry has imploded. According to data collected from CoinGecko, Ethereum has increased by 7% and Bitcoin has increased by 17% over the past month.
Furthermore, high-frequency trading, a sector that has brought in a lot of business for Kagan's former company, Mellanox, which was subsequently bought by Nvidia, is more comparable to crypto than it is to high-frequency trading.
Michael Kagan additionally stated that we [Nvidia] are heavily involved in the business: Wall Street consumers buy our products to reduce the length of cables by a few nanoseconds; banking institutions go as far as to pull fiber under the Hudson to make the distance among their data centers and the stock exchange a little bit shorter; and we [Nvidia] are also heavily involved in the finance industry.
"I [Kagan] never believed that cryptocurrency is something that will do something good for humanity. You know, 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 role in the advancement of AI
It's barely a coincidence that Nvidia products are playing a key role in the ongoing development of artificial intelligence as you realize that the company was once known for creating strong graphics cards for PC gamers to play the most recent game titles.
It turns out that the kind of cheap yet capable processors that gamers have embraced greatly speed up the computationally intensive work of training new artificial intelligence systems, which can take millions of billions of dollars worth of computing power.
Microsoft revealed the company had recently purchased thousands of the A100 GPUs, Nvidia's AI-focused processors, to enable OpenAI workloads. In order to support Amazon's AWS cloud computing service, Nvidia has sold 20,000 H100s, the chip's replacement, as well as 16,000 more to Oracle.
Additionally, Nvidia rents direct access to the chips through its DGX cloud services, which start at less than $37,000 a month for eight H100s linked in a "cluster".
Nvidia's chief executive, Jensen Huang, declared at the company's annual conference that his company is the engine behind "AI's iPhone moment" and that its "generative AI" will "reinvent almost every industry."
Due to regulatory issues, Nvidia's $40 billion acquisition of the British tech firm Arm last year was abandoned.
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