Nvidia claims crypto ‘useless’ to society as company continues AI push

❘ Published: 2023-03-27T08:51:47

❘ Updated: 2023-03-27T08:51:47

Nvidia’s CTO, Michael Kagan has said in a statement that Crypto adds nothing “useful to society” compared to the company’s efforts in AI and other applications.

The world of cryptocurrency seems to be a little less popular these days, especially for major chipmaker Nvidia. The company has repeatedly restricted its GPUs for cryptocurrency mining, even going so far as to release “LHR” versions of the RTX 3000 series to prevent them from being used in crypto mining rigs. Moving to the RTX 4000 series, it seems the company has little to worry about thanks to better options.

Nvidia also released various GPUs, dedicated to professional mining, and even faced a $5.5 million fine for not disclosing how many graphics cards were shipped to crypto miners in 2022.

With Ethereum changing to a proof-of-stake model, consumer graphics cards have fallen out of favor with GPU miners. Nvidia has also seemingly moved on from catering to the demands of cryptocurrency miners, as the company begins a major AI push, which began with its GTC 2023 keynote.

Nvidia CTO on cryptocurrencies: “it doesn’t bring anything useful to society”

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In an interview with The Guardian, Nvidia CTO Micheal Kagan has stated the following regarding Nvidia’s relationship with crypto:

“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 it finally collapsed, because it doesn’t bring anything useful to society. AI does it.“

Kagan went on to state: “I never believed that [crypto] is something that will do something good for humanity. You know, people do crazy things, but they buy your stuff, you sell it. But you don’t redirect the company to support whatever it is.“

The company is a leader with a focus on AI in the future, and there are hardly any other companies better positioned to provide the pure computing power required than Nvidia. OpenAI uses Nvidia GPUs to power the famous ChatGPT, with the company reportedly purchasing around 30,000 GPUs.

With demand for AI products skyrocketing, it’s no wonder Nvidia has revealed its DGX supercomputers, with a way for smaller companies to buy the hardware and start running generative AI models, like Google Bard.

For now, however, it looks like the usual crypto boom is over, especially with major companies like Nvidia making public statements about its alleged uselessness.