After the crypto mining boom, it was an Nvidia manager of all people who settled the hype

If you look back about two years, the general public has not yet heard much about AI. Instead, the trend topic at the time was cryptomining.

Today, on the other hand, crypto has moved to the second row and has to leave the limelight to the ChatGPTs, Dall-Es and Co. of this world. In contrast to crypto, however, they actually have the potential to stay in the long term and change our lives – at least according to an Nvidia manager of all people.

No benefit to society

Such drastic words come from Michael Kagan, Nvidia’s CTO (Chief Technology Officer). As The Guardian reports, it is very clear to him why cryptomining as a technology ultimately failed:

With this, Kagan also makes it clear where the big difference between cryptomining and AI lies. In his opinion, the latter has exactly this added value for society, which can ensure long-term adaptation. But accessibility is also different with AI:

Crypto or AI: Nvidia earns with it

Nvidia itself has benefited greatly from the mining boom, even though there were later performance brakes in the driver to artificially limit the efficiency of gaming graphics cards when mining Ethereum (which only worked more or less well).

At the same time, cards specialized in Ethereum were introduced in 2021. This as CMP (Cryptocurrency Mining Processor) GPUs never really gained a foothold in the market, especially since they were significantly more expensive and less available than gaming graphics cards.

According to CNBC, while CMPs generated sales of around $266 million in the summer of 2021, by early 2022 it was only $24 million. For comparison: Nvidia’s sales of gaming graphics cards are instead in the four-digit range or in the billions.

Ultimately, however, Kagan cannot help but admit what is already obvious by saying the following: People do crazy things, but they buy your stuff and you sell it to them.

This also applies to the relatively young AI hype, which relies on a lot of fast hardware, such as Nvidia has to offer in the form of its own workstation GPUs. So it’s no wonder that Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang recently compared the emergence of AIs with the relevance of the first iPhone.