The chief technology officer (CTO) of US chipmaker Nvidia, Michael Kagan, is skeptical of crypto’s benefit to society, according to a report.
Comparing the use of Nvidia’s graphics to mine crypto assets versus powering artificial general intelligence tools such as ChatGPT, The Guardian quotes Kagan as saying that the former has no benefit to society while the latter does.
“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 to society. AI does.
With ChatGPT, everybody can now create his own machine, his own program; 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’.”
On crypto mining creating demand for Nvidia’s graphics cards, Kagan tells 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, and you sell them stuff. But you don’t redirect the company to support whatever it is.”
Last year in May, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced it had settled charges with Nvidia over the chipmaker’s failure to adequately disclose the significant revenues it had generated from crypto mining in the 2018 fiscal year.
Announcing the settlement, the SEC accused Nvidia of underreporting the revenues generated from crypto mining while attributing the significant sales increase to gaming.
Nvidia settled with the SEC for $5.5 million, according to a report by The Verge.
While Kagan argues that the crypto industry has “collapsed,” Bitcoin and Ethereum, the two largest cryptocurrencies by market cap, have regained value in recent months. Bitcoin is up 17% in the past month, and Ethereum is up 7% per CoinGecko data.
The emerging Web3 gaming industry has also seen substantial venture capital funding in recent months. But Kagan simply doesn’t believe that crypto has merit.
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