- Nvidia CTO Michael Kagan has stated that crypto has no use for society.
- He also lauded the impact of ChatGPT and its usefulness across various industries.
ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence chatbot developed by the AI company OpenAI. The platform has taken the world by storm for its ability to comprehensively search the internet for text, build a statistical model, and come up with relevant content in response to a specific query. Its successful acceptance by internet users has forced Michael Kagan, Chief Technology Officer at US chip-maker Nvidia to question the usefulness of cryptocurrency to society. According to Kagan, crypto does not bring anything useful to society.
Nvidia is said to have never embraced the crypto community despite selling a high quantity of powerful processors to the sector. It can be recalled that the company released software in 2021, however, it was artificially constrained from using its graphic card to mine Ethereum. This was meant to ensure that supply is delivered to its preferred customers – AI researchers and gamers. In response, Kagan stated that the decision was due to the limited value of using its processing power to mine 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 eventually it collapsed because it doesn’t bring anything useful for society. AI does. With ChatGPT, everybody can now create his own machine, his own programme: 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’.
Kagan claims he never believed in crypto
The cryptocurrency industry has led to a lot of businesses for Mellanox, the company founded by Kagan before it was acquired by Nvidia. Kagan admitted that he never believed in crypto, however, its products are heavily patronized by the industry.
We were heavily involved in also trading: people on Wall Street were buying our stuff to save a few nanoseconds on the wire, the banks were doing crazy things like pulling the fibres under the Hudson taut to make them a little big shorter, to save a few nanoseconds between their datacentre and the stock exchange. 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 them stuff. But you don’t redirect the company to support whatever it is.
In 2019, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a press conference in Tel Aviv, Israel that crypto is in the past. Prior to that, the company had overshipped its graphics cards (GPUs) following the increase in demand for crypto. However, the significant fall in crypto mining heavily affected the company as it had ‘too much product in the channel’.
In its annual conference last year, Huang declared that the company is the driving force behind “the iPhone moment of AI”. According to him, its ‘generative AI’ could have an impact on every industry. Before this, Microsoft had purchased several of Nvidia’s AI-focused A100 GPUs from OpenAI.
