Nvidia is likely the company you thought of as being closest to cryptocurrency, but it apparently doesn’t like to think of itself as being so. Speaking to the Guardian, chief technology officer at Nvidia, Michael Kagan, has stated that crypto does not "bring anything useful for society", and instead believes the future belongs to AI.
It’s not really too surprising an admission, as it has long been critical of its GPUs being used to create cryptocoin. In 2021, it even went as far as to release software that would impair the ability for its GPUs to be used to mine Ethereum. But regardless of that fact, Nvidia’s fortunes have long been tied to crypto, since its graphics cards were used in huge numbers in crypto farms around the world. It even got to the point where rises and falls in prominent cryptocoin pricing would trigger the same in Nvidia’s stock pricing.
Instead, Nvidia would rather we all focused on AI. "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," Kagan told the Guardian.
"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."
AI also relies heavily on supercomputers, and Nvidia definitely sees a future for itself in this space, having pegged the emergent technology as being the most likely to cause future impact, and need its technology too. The first version of ChatGPT was trained on a supercomputer comprised of 10,000 Nvidia graphics cards, and Nvidia has been making hay with AI processing, having sold tens of thousands of the AI-focused A100 GPU to Microsoft, and even more thousands of the successor chip, the H100, to Amazon and Oracle.
While Kagan’s words are likely to upset some crypto enthusiasts, it seems Nvidia as a whole isn’t shy of broadcasting its opposition to cryptocurrency. Will its AI gamble pay off? We’ll have to wait and see, but judging by how chatbots are taking off, it may end up being a good gamble.