Cryptocurrencies are not ‘useful to society’, says Nvidia

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.

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

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.

“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.”

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.