Cryptocurrencies are not ‘useful to society’, says Nvidia

By William On Mar 27, 2023

From Bitcoin to Ethereum, cryptocurrencies are being hailed as the new way to pay for products and services online.

But according to one expert, “they don’t bring anything useful to society,” despite the fact that they consume a huge amount of computing power.

Michael Kagan, chief technology officer at chipmaker Nvidia, has said that cryptocurrencies will never “do any good for humanity.”

The expert has cited artificial intelligence (AI) – including chatbot ChatGPT – as more useful to the public and a better use of energy than “crypto mining.”

Cryptocurrencies are mined to generate new coins and verify transactions, but it is more environmentally friendly than beef production, a recent study found.

Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are the internet’s version of money – unique digital properties that can be transferred from one person to another

Kagan said the guard that developing chatbots along the lines of ChatGPT was a more valuable act than crypto mining.

What is Crypto Mining?

People create Bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies through what is known as mining.

Mining is the process of solving complex math problems using computers running Bitcoin software.

These mining puzzles become more and more difficult as more Bitcoins come into circulation.

Each time a puzzle is solved, a new group of transactions – known as blocks – is added to the blockchain (the shared transaction record).

Miners are rewarded by receiving bitcoin.

Created by San Francisco-based company OpenAI, ChatGPT is trained on a massive amount of text so it can generate human-like answers to questions.

Since its release in November, it has been used to write essays, prescribe antibiotics, fool recruitment agencies, and even come up with beer recipes.

“With ChatGPT, anyone can now create their own machine, their own program,” Kagan said.

“You just tell it what to do and it will do it and if it doesn’t work the way you want it to, you tell it ‘I want something else’.”

In comparison, crypto is not “something that will do good for humanity,” Kagan said.

Cryptocurrencies are the internet’s version of money: unique bits of digital code that can be transferred from one person to another.

Mining, meanwhile, allows people to earn cryptocurrencies by solving computational problems that verify transactions in the currency.

“All that crypto stuff needed parallel processing, and [Nvidia] is the best, so people just programmed it to use for this purpose,” Kagan said.

Bitcoin is the world’s most popular cryptocurrency, but others include Ethereum and Litecoin (file photo)

Pictured, a data center of the BitRiver company that provides services for cryptocurrency mining in the city of Bratsk in the Irkutsk region, Russia, March 2, 2021. The cryptocurrency is “mined” by powerful computers that solve computational mathematical puzzles, the complexity of which requires huge amounts of energy

“They bought a lot of stuff and eventually it collapsed, because it doesn’t bring anything useful to society. AI does.’

His comments came despite Nvidia selling graphics processing units (GPUs) for use in crypto mining, even though the company released software in 2021 that deliberately went against the practice.

Instead, the American company likes to focus on supplying its chips to the gaming sector, helping to render graphics and images by performing quick mathematical calculations.

It is also rapidly expanding into areas such as AU, supplying its GPUs to smart vehicles and robotics, including Tesla and Amazon.

‘[GPU] users are constantly discovering new applications for them, from weather simulation and gene sequencing to deep learning and robotics,” said Matt Wuebbling, global head of GeForce marketing at Nvidia. the guard.

“Mining cryptocurrency is one of them.”

Earlier this month, Microsoft said it had recently purchased tens of thousands of Nvidia AI-focused GPUs to support the workload of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT.

Microsoft is an investor in the company and the two have partnered to accelerate “AI breakthroughs.”

ChatGPT is a large language model trained on a massive amount of text data, allowing it to generate eerily human-like text in response to a given prompt

OpenAI has already launched a more powerful second version of the tool called GPT-4, which is so advanced it can be “harmful.”

“GPT-4 and successor models have the potential to significantly impact society in both beneficial and detrimental ways,” the company said.

Its success has sent panic to Google, which fears that its days as the world’s number one search engine may soon come to an end.

Google rushed to come up with its own equivalent chatbot, called Bard, which will be released in the “coming weeks.”

Unfortunately for Google, Bard presented misinformation as fact in a Twitter video, instantly wiping out £100 billion from the tech giant’s value.

Will ChatGPT replace Google?

Gmail developer Paul Buchheit has predicted that “AI will eliminate the search engine results page” and cause “total disruption” for Google.

A New York Times report also said Google executives within the company issued a code red amid mounting pressure from ChatGPT.

A major way Google makes money is that advertisers pay to display their links next to the results of a search, in the hopes that a user will click on them.

The fluidity and coherence of the results now being generated has people in Silicon Valley wondering what the future of Google’s monopoly holds.

“The way I imagine this happens is that the URL/search bar of the [Google] browser is replaced by AI that auto-completes my thought/question as I type it while providing the best answer (which could be a link to a website or product) at the same time,” Buchheit said.

“The old search engine backend will be used by the AI to collect relevant information and links, which will then be summarized for the user,” Bucheit explains.

“It’s like asking a professional human researcher to do the job, except the AI immediately does what would take a human many minutes.”

While some think ChatGPT will replace Google, the AI has a different opinion.

As an AI language model, I don’t have the ability to take over any company or organization, including Google.

My goal is to help and provide useful answers to users who interact with me.

“Google is a multinational technology company with a strong market presence and a wide range of products and services, so it is highly unlikely that any single entity, including an AI language model like myself, could take over Google.

“Moreover, I believe that companies like Google and AI language models like myself can work together to provide even better solutions and services to users around the world.”