Nvidia distances itself from cryptocurrencies, remarking that it adds nothing to the society

The Chief Technology Officer of U.S.-based graphic card company, Nvidia, has said that cryptocurrencies do contribute anything to society. In an interview with Nvidia’s CTO, Micheal Kagan, he revealed that he never believed in the technology and chatbots like ChatGPT are more useful than cryptos. This marks the company’s shift from centering on crypto mining during the pandemic to AI.

Kagan elaborated further that the crypto and blockchain technology needed a lot of parallel processing and people purchased Nvidia’s Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) in bulk for crypto mining. Then the sector saw a downturn in 2022 because cryptocurrencies are not worth it for the sector, according to Kagan. Since bitcoin's peak in November 2021, the cryptocurrency has lost 60% of its value.

The CTO later hailed the use of artificial intelligence as revolutionary and will be more advantageous to society. Kagan said that with ChatGPT, people can have their own program and it can ask the AI to do things according to their own needs.

Nvidia had a hesitant relationship with cryptocurrencies. On one hand, Nvidia 2021 released a new lineup of graphics cards that would artificially lower their performance when used for crypto mining. On the other hand, Nvidia profited from their GPU sales to crypto miners. In 2022, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission fined the company $5.5 million for its unlawful failure to disclose the number of graphic cards it sold for crypto mining. The crypto mining boom was a major contributor to the shortage of graphic cards during the pandemic.

Nvidia is a technology company that designs and manufactures computer graphics processing units (GPUs), as well as other products related to artificial intelligence (AI), gaming, and autonomous vehicles. Nvidia was established in 1993.