Nvidia Unsurprisingly Says Crypto Not Useful to Society, Chooses AI

Nvidia is team AI after declaring that cryptocurrencies do not “bring anything useful for society.”

In an interview with The Guardian, Nvidia CTO Michael Kagan said AI chat bots such as ChatGPT are more useful than mining crypto.

The US chipmaker's stance on crypto has been overwhelmingly negative in the past. In 2021, Nvidia even released software for its graphics card that artificially constrained their use for mining crypto.

Conversely, Nvidia is extremely pro-AI. The first version of ChatGPT was even trained on supercomputer with 10,000 Nvidia graphics cards.

“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 UK broadsheet.

“With ChatGPT, everybody can now create his own machine, his own programme: 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.’”

Kagan's view doesn't just stem from towing the party line either. Prior to his role in Nvidia, Kagan founded Mellanox, which earned a great deal of business from crypto high-frequency trading. Mellanox was acquired by Nvidia in 2019.

“We were heavily involved in also 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 fibres under the Hudson taut to make them a little bit shorter, to save a few nanoseconds between their datacentre and the stock exchange,” he said.

Nonetheless Kagan's dislike for crypto prevails.

“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 vs Web3

Web3 promised the world it would revolutionise the internet, media, and everything we know about the world. AI is making a similar promise. However, despite their innovative nature, the two aren't interchangeable, nor are they necessarily compatible.

Earlier this month, Fantom founder Andre Cronje said that AI is not ready to be integrated with Blockchain technology in its current form, despite OpenAI's ChatGPT leading to an increase in AI-related cryptocurrency projects in 2023.

“There is no integration. An AI can’t live inside a blockchain,” Cronje explained.

“AI’s are also black box and mutable, blockchains are transparent and immutable," he added.

CakeDefi Co-Founder and CTO U-Zyn Chua also told Blockhead that AI is limited for blockchain tech. "AI’s impact on blockchain specifically will be minimal simply due to the different nature of both technologies," he said.

"One of the core attributes of blockchain is that it has to be deterministic, but AI functions in a fuzzier way – you get a different answer each time you ask AI."

However, advances have been made in the metaverse space. Last week, metaverse builder Oncyber launched a new AI-powered tool called Magic Composer, through which users can customize their metaverse via text input in real time. The tool runs on OpenAI's GPT-3.5 model.

The world of Web3 can be quite a whirlwind. Whether it’s crypto news in Singapore, South East Asia or even across the globe, we understand how busy the industry is keeping you, so we kindly send out three newsletters each week:

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