Nvidia wants to contribute to AI, not crypto deemed unnecessary by its CTO

Despite the launch of GPUs dedicated to crypto mining, Nvidia is distancing itself from the industry. For its CTO Michael Kagan, the crypto does not bring anything to the society, on the contrary of theartificial intelligence.

“We are players, right down to our fingertips”, said Nvidia in 2021. The graphics card manufacturer then decreed the clamping of its GPUs to discourage their use by crypto-currency miners.

However, the manufacturer did not close the door to this industry, announcing its dedicated range CMP. The mining and crypto have contributed significantly to Nvidia’s results. The latter, however, has another priority: artificial intelligence.

Crypto brings nothing useful to society

L’Generative AIin full media boom since ChatGPT, was at the heart of its last annual conference GTC. To the point of encouraging the technology director of Nvidia, Michael Kaganto clearly distance himself from the crypto ?

For the leader, the cryptocurrencies “do not bring anything useful to society,” reports The Guardian. A position that reminds us of the debate on the social utility of Bitcoin… On the other hand, Nvidia’s graphics processors would be otherwise more useful by powering conversational agents such as ChatGPT.

The first version of OpenAI’s AI benefited during its training phase from the computing power of a supercomputer with nearly 10,000 Nvidia GPUs. These processors are used extensively during these key stages of AI development.

Generative AI is the new Eldorado for Nvidia

All this crypto stuff needed parallel processing, and [Nvidia] is the best, so people programmed it to do that. They bought a lot of hardware, and then they ended up collapsing, because it doesn’t do anything useful for society, unlike AI,” says the CTO.

So Kagan is not an aficionado of the crypto. The financial industry is no stranger to him though. The Nvidia executive founded Mellanox, which has since been bought by the graphics card giant.

As he points out The GuardianHigh-frequency trading, which Kagan likens to crypto, was an important source of revenue for Mellanox. Thanks to its technology, Wall Street accelerated its stock market operations.

iPhone moment for AI, bear market for crypto

I never believed that [les crypto-monnaies] could do any good for humanity. You know, people do crazy things, but they buy your products, so you sell them products. But you don’t redirect the company to support anything,” says the technology director.

Nvidia does not intend to be associated with crypto. At the annual conference, its CEO Jensen Huang thus focused on AI. According to him, artificial intelligence is currently experiencing its “iPhone moment.” He thus believes that generative AI, to which Nvidia provides its computing power, will reinvent virtually every industry.

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