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.
Analysts from Bitpro Consulting estimated that Ethereum miners purchased $15 billion worth of GPUs over the period between early 2021 and mid-2022. Miners bought some of the best gaming graphics cards around, and demand from these customers increased prices of gaming hardware to levels that were too high for your average buyer.
Officially, Nvidia only sold its CMP (crypto mining processor) GPUs to professional miners, but in reality, many of the company's gaming graphics cards were sold at retail at prices higher than MSRP to cryptominers, too. In fact, Nvidia even had to pay the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) a fine of $5.5 million for failure to disclose "that cryptomining was a significant factor in year-over-year growth in the company's gaming revenue" during consecutive quarters in its 2018 fiscal year."
"I never believed that [crypto] is something that will do something good for humanity," said Kagan. "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."
