NVidia CEO Says AI Contributes More To Society Than Crypto

A report says that Michael Kagan, the chief technology officer (CTO) of US chipmaker Nvidia, is not sure that crypto is good for society.

The Guardian quotes Kagan as saying that using Nvidia’s graphics cards to mine crypto assets has no benefit to society, while using them to power artificial general intelligence tools like ChatGPT 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’.”

Kagan tells The Guardian that crypto mining is making people want Nvidia’s graphics cards.

“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.”

In May of 2018, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said it had reached a settlement with Nvidia over the chipmaker’s failure to properly report the large profits it made from crypto mining in the 2018 fiscal year.

The SEC said in a statement about the settlement that Nvidia had underreported the money it made from crypto mining while attributing a big jump in sales to gaming.

A report from The Verge says that Nvidia paid the SEC $5.5 million to settle the case.