Despite a relatively broad history with cryptocurrencies and digital assets, graphics card manufacturer Nvidia has come out to say that crypto has no purpose in society.
Nvidia Doesn’t Think Crypto Has Much to It
In a recent interview, the company’s chief technology officer Micheal Kagan commented that the graphics cards Nvidia creates should be utilized for activities other than simply mining crypto. He suggested using them to power AI-based technologies like Chat GPT. He said:
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 Chat GPT, everybody can now create his own machine, his own program. 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.’
Chat GPT is getting a lot of traction as of late given it’s an application that will pretty much write whatever you need it to, from a blog post to a speech, as in the case of a recent one produced for Joe Biden. Apparently the President’s brain is melting so badly he can’t even take the time to write his own speech; he needs a machine to do it for him.
In any case, putting this present situation aside, Kagan is confident in the technology and he thinks the company’s graphics cards will be put to greater use should they be utilized to power said applications instead of extracting new units of crypto from the blockchain. He stated:
We were heavily involved in algo 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 fibers under the Hudson taut to make them a little bit shorter, to save a few nanoseconds between their datacenter 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.
The Company Was Once Heavily Tied to Digital Currency
The funny thing about this entire situation is the fact that Nvidia has been used heavily over the years specifically for mining purposes. So many of the firm’s products were sold to miners that the company wound up getting indirectly tied to digital assets about five years earlier, and when crypto prices crashed, so did its revenue and stock shares.
At the same time, Nvidia failed to disclose how much money it made from miners in 2022. This led to a $5.5 million fine from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).