The Crypto Mining boom has somewhat died down with the transfer of Ethereum to proof of stake and its no secret that the graphics card manufacturers profited enormously from crypto, though apparently, NVIDIA has changed their stance on crypto.
NVIDIA Executive Against Crypto
Michael Kegan, Chief Technology Officer at NVIDIA was interviewed by Alex Hern of the Guardian where Kegan was quoted as saying cryptocurrencies do not “bring anything useful for society”. This statement is rather bizarre to me as NVIDIA made huge profits from the crypto-mining sector but then again, Ethereum moving to proof of stake negated most of the market for crypto-mining GPUs so it makes sense to say it now.
Despite the profits to be made NVIDIA displayed themselves publically as not openly supporting crypto-mining going as far as releasing LHR software for their GeForce graphics cards to prevent them from being used for mining and to ensure they went to gamers or AI researchers.
Crypto Doesn’t Bring Anything to Society
So what does Kagan believe to be more important than cryptocurrency? Well, Kegan believes that AI is a much more valuable thing for graphics card resources to be utilised for and told the Guardian:
“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 for society. AI does,”
Personally, I see his argument, I’m not massively well versed when it comes to Crypto and related NFTs but I’ve not seen any good come out of either and they mostly just appear to be a massive pyramid scheme. Nobody thinks you’re cool because you paid a small fortune for a funny monkey .jpg. AI is a much more valuable use of our time and efforts as it can provide real-world benefits for the majority of people whilst crypto only seems to exist to make people richer.
These comments from Kagan should be rightfully scrutinised as NVIDIA still profited massively off the industry that they suddenly don’t like because it isn’t making them money any more. At the end of the day a company has to make money, just would be nice if they were honest about it unlike how they tried to hide their sales in the crypto market.
What is your opinion on Kagan’s comments? Let us know in the comments.
