Nvidia’s powerful processors are being sold in large quantities to the cryptocurrency market, but the US chipmaker has argued that cryptocurrencies do not provide any meaningful benefit to society. Michael Kagan, the company’s chief technology officer, has claimed that processing power could be better utilized for more meaningful purposes, such as artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT.
Nvidia has never fully embraced the crypto community, and in 2021, it released software that restricted Nvidia’s ability to use its graphics cards for mining the popular Ethereum cryptocurrency. The decision was made to give priority to the provision of graphics cards for its preferred customers, such as AI researchers and gamers. Kagan supported the decision, stating that the limited value of mining cryptocurrencies made the move justifiable.
The first version of ChatGPT was trained on a supercomputer that had around 10,000 Nvidia graphics cards. The utilization of Nvidia’s graphics cards for parallel processing in the cryptocurrency industry was popularized by the company’s superior technology, according to Kagan.
In contrast, the cryptocurrency industry was more similar to high-frequency trading, which was a lucrative business for Mellanox, the company founded by Kagan before it was acquired by Nvidia.
He stated that he never had faith in the idea that [crypto] would have a positive impact on humanity. People do crazy things, but they buy your stuff, and you sell it to them. But you don’t redirect the company to support whatever it is.
Nvidia’s products were initially renowned for their high-performance graphics cards designed for PC gaming, but they unintentionally became an integral part of the AI revolution. It was discovered that the task of training new AI systems, which could require millions or even billions of dollars in computational power, could be accomplished much more efficiently on the simple yet powerful graphical processors used by gamers. Thus, Nvidia’s products were perfectly positioned to meet the demands of the AI market.