Nvidia's CTO Believes Cryptocurrency Mining is Valueless for Society

Michael Kagan, the CTO of Nvidia, has recently expressed his opinion that mining cryptocurrencies does not contribute to society.

In an interview with The Guardian, Kagan explains that the revenue of Nvidia's gaming division has significantly decreased in the lead-up to the Ethereum merge in September 2023. To combat mining with Nvidia's video cards, the company attempted to prevent miners from using their LHR series at the beginning of 2021. Kagan believes that this was the right decision, as mining cryptocurrencies adds nothing useful to society. Instead, he advocates for the deployment of computing power towards AI and large language models. Recently, Nvidia unveiled a new accelerator specifically designed for LLMs.

“All this crypto stuff needed parallel computing power. Since Nvidia has the best performance in this area, miners have bought a lot of hardware and programmed it for this purpose. In the end, things collapsed, because it added nothing useful to society – AI did.”

Kagan praised the capabilities of the AI chatbot, ChatGPT, which was initially trained on a supercomputer consisting of approximately 10,000 Nvidia graphics cards. He compared cryptocurrency mining to high-frequency trading, which was significant for Mellanox, a company he founded before its acquisition by Nvidia. Kagan expressed doubts about crypto's impact on society and emphasized that AI chatbots have tremendous potential to benefit individuals and drive innovation.