According to Nvidia, the world’s largest manufacturer of graphics processing units ( GTS), cryptocurrencies don’t ‘bring anything helpful for society’. This was despite the fact that his company sells large quantities of video cards to this industry.
According to Michael Kagan, Nvidia’s Chief Technology officer, other uses of their processing power are better than mining crypto.
The U.S. tech company is also a major supplier AI hardware and software. However, it hasn’t been very keen on the cryptocurrency market. It tried to limit the use of its GPUs to mine ether ( ETH) two years ago. This second-largest cryptocurrency was very popular at the time among miners.
Kagan argued that the decision to supply Nvidia’s most valued customers, such as gamers and AI researchers, was justified due to the low value of the powerful processors used to extract digital currency.
“All this crypto stuff needed parallel processing, [Nvidia] being the best, so people just programed it for this purpose. It didn’t provide any useful benefits for society, so they bought lots of stuff. AI does,’ Kagan explained.
Chatgpt allows anyone to create their own machine or program. All you have to do is tell it what it should do. According to the newspaper, the chatbot was trained initially on a supercomputer with 10,000 GPUs from Nvidia.
Microsoft recently announced that it had bought tens of thousands A100s from Nvidia, Nvidia’s AI-focused GPUs. This was for Openai which is the developer of Chatgpt, which the software giant owns. Nvidia also sold its H100 successor to Amazon for its cloud service AWS and 16,000 units to Oracle, the British newspaper detailed.
Nvidia also rents access through its DGX cloud services to the chips and is involved with other AI projects. Last week’s annual conference saw CEO Jensen Huang refer to Nvidia as the engine behind “the iPhone moment in AI” and predict that Nvidia’s generative AI would “reinvent almost every industry.”
While the two are competing for Nvidia’s resources, artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies will likely cross paths more frequently in the future. U.S. crypto-exchange Coinbase revealed that it had used Chatgpt to perform pre-listing risk assessments of tokens. The results were worthy of further investigation.