Having earned a boatload of money selling graphics processors to miners of crypto currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum, Nvidia now says that cryptocurrencies are useless for society. Instead of wasting GPU compute power for mining, it can be used to run various artificial intelligence applications like smart chatbots. “All this crypto stuff, it needed parallel processing, and [Nvidia] is the best, so people just programmed it to use for this purpose,” said Michael Kagan, chief technology officer of Nvidia, in an interview with The Guardian (via VideoCardz). “They bought a lot of stuff, and then eventually it collapsed, because it doesn’t bring anything useful for society. AI does,” Kagan told the Guardian.” Microsoft’s ChatGPT was trained on a supercomputer based on 10,000 Nvidia A100 compute GPUs (although some implementations may use different hardware). The Generative Pre-trained Transformer also uses Nvidia’s DGX servers to run. But while Microsoft only used 10,000 of compute GPUs to make a product that can be used by almost everyone on the planet, it’s likely that hundreds of thousands of GPUs were used to mine Bitcoins and Ethereum currencies that were useful for people courageous enough to earn on them and desperate enough to hedge their money in crypto.
Full comment from Nvidia CTO: Cryptocurrency Adds Nothing Useful to Society.
