NVIDIA's AI Winning Streak is Good News for Web3

NVIDIA's stock price continues to soar through the stratosphere, fuelled by its prowess in the AI sector. But having once shunned crypto as not bringing "anything useful for society,” are there still lessons the Web3 can learn from the tech titan about AI's future?

Having already jumped 225.10% over the year, NVIDIA saw its stock price surge another $20 per share in after-hours trading.

In its most recent earnings call, held yesterday, NVIDIA reported a net income boost of 769% from last year to $12.29 billion and a total revenue boost of 265% to $22.10 billion, obliterating expectations of $20.62 billion.

The firm directly cited AI as a reason behind its success. “Accelerated computing and generative AI have hit the tipping point. Demand is surging worldwide across companies, industries and nations,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA.

Strong sales for AI chips for servers, particularly the company’s “Hopper” chips such as the H100, were highlighted by the firm.

NVIDIA chips cost $10K to $15K each, with the H100 exceeding $40,000.

AI, Not Crypto

NVIDA has made no qualms about being strictly an AI company with explicitly no dealings with crypto or blockchain. In an interview with The Guardian, NVIDIA CTO Michael Kagan said AI chatbots 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.’”

AI, And Crypto

NVIDIA has proven that AI is hotly in demand. Its chips are regarded as the best option for processing huge quantities of data to train and operate generative image tools, as well as language models.

These uses aren't completely foreign to the Web3 world. Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin believes AI's ability to process huge data sets could be utilized through arbitrage bots.

Market participants are often "irrational" and people with the "right knowledge" are not willing to "take the time and bet unless a lot of money is involved," Buterin says.

Introducing AIOmen, Buterin says AI is already being used to predict the market. These AI bots are cost-effective too, working for less than $1 per hour whilst being armed with an encyclopedic knowledge database.

"If you make a market, and put up a liquidity subsidy of $50, humans will not care enough to bid, but thousands of AIs will easily swarm all over the question and make the best guess they can," Buterin explains.

Security in crypto could also be enhanced with AI's advanced mechanics such as through Metamask's scam detection feature and Rabby's wallet simulation feature.

He suggests that these security tools "could be super-charged with AI," offering a "much richer human-friendly explanation of what kind of dapp you are participating in." AI can help the user understand what exactly they are signing and whether the project is genuine.

Although these systems do not necessarily require NVIDIA chips to run, the chip company's recent success demonstrates that firms are willing to pay top dollar to access AI, if it can truly revolutionize and streamline their processes.

Money, AI & Crypto

AI-related tokens have surged since NVIDIA revealed its earnings. SingularityNet (AGIX) is up over 33%, Render (RNDR) has jumped more than 17%, and Fetch.ai (FET) has risen over 10%.

The market cap of AI-related tokens has surpassed $17.3 billion too.

However, many of the top cryptocurrencies have traded sideways, suggesting that there is no direct correlation between AI and regular crypto.

Nonetheless, the Web3 world remains confident that AI will play an integral part in its development.

“If we think about AIs transacting with each other as autonomous beings in the future, what currency they will transact in, it has to be crypto,” Animoca Brands founder Yat Siu said.

“In the future, 70-80% of transactions will happen through autonomous AI agents and the decentralised nature of crypto makes it a perfect match,” he said.

Siu believes the two technologies are "firmly intertwined." With NVIDIA proving that serious money can be made in AI, it would seem foolish for Web3 to not embrace the tech.

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