In Sign of Hypocrisy, Nvidia CTO Says Crypto is Not Useful to Society

Hey Hackers!

During an interview for The Guardian, Nvidia’s Chief Technology Officer, Michael Kagan, said cryptocurrency does not “bring anything useful for society”.

Kagan went even further and said he “never believed” crypto would “do something good for humanity”. These comments are not too surprising as the global dogpile on the cryptocurrency industry continues.

Throughout the interview, Nvidia CTO was throwing shade on cryptocurrency, while also hyping up the recent surge of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Kagan believes that ChatGPT and future AI will be exponentially more impactful for the future when compared to “all this crypto stuff”.

This sentiment might stem from the recent increase in Nvidia GPUs being used for the training and development of AI models.

“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.

With ChatGPT, everybody can now create his own machine, his own program; you just tell it what to do, and it will. And if it doesn’t work the way you want it to, you tell it ‘I want something different’.”

- Michael Kagan, CTO of Nvidia

Starting in 2017, Nvidia began to note that a large majority of their profits have come from a “strong demand for GPU products targeted for use in cryptocurrency mining”.

Despite Nvidia profiting greatly off of crypto miners looking to get the most powerful graphics cards (GPUs), the company has never looked kindly at the crypto community.

As an example of the lengths they would go to deter the crypto industry, Nvidia began installing software on their new GPUs that would limit hashrates of some GPUs. I am not sure how Nvidia can reconcile its hatred for crypto with the fact that the crypto industry is a primary reason for its recent increases in revenue.

It is completely hypocritical for Nvidia to profit off of crypto and simultaneously say it is useless. To add to their hypocrisy, Nvidia has even sold special products designed for professional cryptocurrency mining.

Clearly, Nvidia has no issue taking money and catering to the crypto industry, but they obviously do not respect their consumers.

This will always rub people the wrong way, and it makes me angry that a company would disrespect its customers in such a manner.

What are your thoughts on this news?

Do you think these comments might come back to bite Nvidia in the future? Perhaps a boycott of Nvidia products by crypto miners?

Is it hypocritical for Nvidia to criticize cryptocurrency so harshly, while also profiting off of the industry?