Cryptocurrencies add nothing useful to society, says chip-maker Nvidia

Michael Kagan, its chief technology officer, said other uses of processing power such as the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT were more worthwhile than mining crypto.

Nvidia never embraced the crypto community with open arms. In 2021, the company even released software that artificially constrained the ability to use its graphics cards from being used to mine the popular Ethereum cryptocurrency, in an effort to ensure supply went to its preferred customers instead, who include AI researchers and gamers.

Kagan said the decision was justified because of the limited value of using processing power to mine cryptocurrencies.

The first version ChatGPT was trained on a supercomputer made up of about 10,000 Nvidia graphics cards.

Crypto, by contrast, was more like high-frequency trading, an industry that had led to a lot of business for Mellanox, the company Kagan founded before it was acquired by Nvidia.

The computationally intensive work of training a new AI system, which can take millions of billions of dollars-worth of computing power, happened to work significantly faster on the types of simple yet powerful processors that had been adopted by gamers.