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Cryptocurrencies add nothing useful to society, says chip-maker Nvidia
- gloosx 4y ago"this hyped thing we were into is nothing of use, just a waste of time and money; however, this NEXT hyped thing...."
- techwiz137 4y agoRather than collapsing, Ethereum sought to reduce the energy footprint and they did. Now Nvidia is angry that nobody wants to pay a premium for a 4090 that catches fire.
- hfsygcf 4y agoNot really. 4090s are flying off the shelves.
- moffkalast 4y agoStill, demand would likely be a double or more if ETH hadn't made the switch.
- kkielhofner 4y agoNvidia has (essentially) 100% market share in ML and 50% greater market share than AMD in desktop/gaming[0]. First, a top of the line card like the 4090 blows away everything else in terms of perf. Second, it (and other Nvidia hardware) is actually usable for something other than driving a display/gaming. In the end a 30% (or whatever) premium for cards that offer better performance and can actually do stuff results in the obvious (buy Nvidia). Nvidia isn't angry about anything. [0] https://overclock3d.net/news/gpu_displays/amd_s_gpu_market_share_dropped_to_an_all-time_low_in_q3_2022_-_nvidia_dominates/1 https://overclock3d.net/news/gpu_displays/amd_s_gpu_market_s...
- flandish 4y agoReminder: when a corporation says “useful” they mean “profitable.” I’m not on the crypto bandwagon, I just want folks to take anything a corp says with a grain of salt.
- DANmode 4y ago"Look, shiny and unoptimized AI model code!"
- hfsygcf 4y agoThat may be your opinion but it doesn’t make any sense in this context. NVIDIA profited enormously from the crypto boom.
- jfengel 4y agoIn this case they may well imply each other. If there were uses, it would likely be profitable for them.
- rvz 4y ago> I just want folks to take anything a corp says with a grain of salt. Exactly. As soon as Ethereum switched to a more emissions friendly consensus mechanism, there was no need to use wasteful GPUs which already were burning up th e planet. Of course a shovel maker would now see GPU mining as unprofitable. As long as AI is still inefficient in the way it goes by training neural networks, then Nvidia will always be its shovel maker (until someone finds a cheaper and efficient alternative way that doesn't require GPUs)
- partiallypro 4y agoDoes your comment also cover not trusting exchanges that back stable coins with pure fraud or pump and dump coins before listing them on their exchanges... Or does this only cover companies and individuals that think crypto has yet to find a good Avenue in society?
- flandish 4y agoAny and all.
- curiousgal 4y agoI always chuckle when someone claims anything to be good or bad for "society" as if the human experience is somehow uniform across the globe. Oh please
- mepian 4y agoHilarious, I don't remember them saying this BEFORE their crypto profits evaporated.
- AviationAtom 4y agoI will say, it seemed like right about the time the crypto markets collapsed again was right when AI application really started taking off and creating great demand. So I think the demand has remained roughly consistent. The big difference being folks with AI needs getting devices purpose build by nVidia for their needs, versus hobbyists buying up stock of consumer cards.
- Spivak 4y agoIt doesn’t seem like they’re salty but more that they don’t have to pretend to be pro-crypto anymore. Put yourself in the position of someone who is fiercely proud of the work they do making GPUs and all the really cool stuff people do with it — video games, cgi rendering, AI, number crunching for scientific computing. Then all of a sudden the shelves are empty because people want to push boulders up a hill and roll them back down and the people who are doing the cool stuff are getting priced out by the competitive boulder rollers who just want want a better boulder to watt ratio. It would take the wind out of my sails because it’s harder to wake up and say, “look at all the cool stuff people are doing with the thing we made.”
- pessimizer 4y agoAccusing someone of not energetically attacking their main income source, whether they thought it was shit at the time or not, is not an own. Maybe I think I suck at painting, so take it up as a joke to bother a friend of mine. I get lucky and start selling paintings by the busload for thousands of dollars each, although I put no more effort into any of them than the first. In fact, since the first took me over an hour to do, I move exclusively to monochromatic drip paintings. When, a decade and tens of millions of dollars later, after my prices crash, I announce publicly that the art market is stupid... is it shrewd not to believe me?
- wmf 4y agoThey were never particularly pro-crypto. When miners were buying GPUs by the pallet load Nvidia was publicly downplaying mining and saying GPUs were for gaming.
- WhereIsTheTruth 4y agoExplain this then? https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/cmp/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/cmp/
- simonw 4y agoLooks like that page hasn't been updated since it first went live three years ago: https://web.archive.org/web/20210218143405/https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/cmp/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210218143405/https://www.nvidi... In Feb 2021 you could still just about be forgiven for thinking that hardware like that optimized for mining was a worthwhile market to be pursuing.
- roydivision 4y agoPerhaps an attempt to sell a dedicated product to that community so the rest of us don’t find it impossible to get a graphics card to play games with?
- SilasX 4y ago"Hey, we really can't keep up this system of just letting anyone graze sheep on the commons willy-nilly. Eventually it'll get overgrazed and produce nothing. To prevent that catastrophe, we need to move to a system where total grazing is limited to a sustainable level." 'Well, then why are you grazing your sheep on the commons? Checkmate.'
- GaveDrohl 4y agoMost crypto currencies don't and probably never will. But those such as Bitcoin that are the most decentralized and censorship resistant are crucial to those living under authoritarian regimes and whose currencies are going through significant debasement. The mad rush to make a quick buck and the propaganda from those in power have distorted the original intent behind crypto. Also, corporations such as Nvidia that depends on the good will of the government are motivated to fall in line with the government's stance, which is negative given the threat it poses to the power and control they maintain having USD as the world reserve currency.
- xapata 4y agoIntent and practice are sadly different. It doesn't seem like Bitcoin, etc. are widely used enough to be crucial to a society such as you describe. And I have a hard time imagining how they could become so, given the difficulty in converting that society's standard currency to cryptocurrency.
- jfengel 4y agoThat's just the problem. It's very popular with people who want to bypass the law. Occasionally that's crucial and laudable. Usually it's drugs and illegal pornography. Which makes its use for anything legal dubious. If it ever could have broken that stigma, the swarm of speculators and scammers made that impossible.
- anonkogudhyfhhf 4y agoIs the law always correct? Specifically in totalitarian countries? The internet is also a tool for braking the law with unrestricted information. Bitcoin is unrestrained money. All the bitcoin copycats controlled by individuals are scams tho
- AviationAtom 4y agoRead a big story about people setting up illicit mining farms in Venezuela (?), using the proceeds to buy goods and have them shipped to them, providing sustenance to those in their community. Unfortunately the government realized the dilapidated grid was hemmorhaging power in the area, tracked them down, and shut it all down.
- cat_plus_plus 4y agoWho is "society"? Users of cryptocurrencies obviously find them useful, or hope they will be in future. The alternative to cryptocurrency and blockchain contracts are global alliances that make trading in dollars easy in all important markets and enforce contracts across jurisdictions. Billions of people who are not part of these alliances are left out and the rest are reliant on US/Europe remaining leading superpowers forever, those in power not developing a grudge against one's business and status quo enforced through military violence. Even if we assume that Western led single market / contract arbitration regime is the way to go, threat of alternatives like crypto is the best way to get its rulemakers to behave, like to not cut off businesses that don't appeal to their sensibilities or devalue dollar with unreasonable speed. It is currently possible to order cannabis with credit card over a cell phone app. Without understanding that people would otherwise just use crypto and also evade taxes and any regulations, I am not so sure that would be the case.
- simonw 4y ago"Users of cryptocurrencies obviously find them useful, or hope they will be in future" Do they hope they'll be useful in the future because they think they're great technology that everyone should benefit from... or do they want them to be useful because they bought in early and want to get rich?
- chank 4y agoWhy not both?
- firmnoodle 4y agoIn most cases it's both. Like the people who were early to the Internet, they believe in a better world and they hope their early participation will be rewarded.
- simonw 4y agoI was early to the internet, and the only financial benefit I ever expected from it was that I'd be able to have a good career because of the skills I'd developed.
- awesomeMilou 4y agoBreaking News: Nvidia raising the bar for how openly hypocritical a company can be with their PR.
- throwaway22032 4y agoThey work, millions use them, but people constantly want to tear them down and claim they have no use. You can just not use them. You almost certainly won't be presented with a case in your everyday life in which someone refuses your cash and only accepts Bitcoin. Meanwhile, every day it becomes harder and harder to avoid using Visa or Mastercard as stores go cash free.
- guilhas 4y agoConfused journalist conflates "cryptocurrency mining" with "cryptocurrencies" That is a pretty big mistake, completely changes what Nvidia said. We should be able to rate news sources from posts And we are at a point where unproductive cpu mining is reaching irrelevance so this is kind of a mute point The future could even be where cryptocurrency mining means making your graphics available for the network to train someone's AI model
- labrador 4y ago“I never believed that [crypto] is something that will do something good for humanity. You know, people do crazy things, but they buy your stuff, you sell them stuff” - Michael Kagan, Nvidia CTO If I sold shovels and meth users liked to dig swimming pools in their back yards at 3:00 am I might say my shovels weren't doing anything good for humanity, but I'd be happy to sell them shovels.
- xapata 4y agoReminds me of when a sushi chef apologized to me for the sea urchin tasting nasty: "Sorry, it's out of season. It's not fresh." "Why do you sell it out of season?" "People still buy it."
- EGreg 4y ago“Search isn’t a business!” Blockchain and Web3 ended up mostly being zero sum games. But that doesn’t mean it’s not capable of being so much more. Who remembers the silly <BLINK> and <MARQUEE> tags? The Web has come a long way. And personally, for all its faults, I find Web3 better than Web2 in terms of economics - rather than giant server farms and Big Tech monopolies, we have UniSwap and Aave Marketplace and Filecoin etc. The network is owned by the participants and no shareholder class to extract rents. Well, ironically AI can be a far bigger negative for society than blockchain. AI can literally destroy all our systems. Its upside may be far lower than its downside. Yet HN loves AI and hates blockchain. Predictable this will be silently downvoted into oblivion because it challenges that narrative, but I would have definitely preferred actual substantive discussion.
- narrator 4y agoAI also suffers front the grey goo and paperclip maximizing issues too.
- itake 4y ago> The network is owned by the participants and no shareholder class to extract rents. Dumb question. But if the network is owned by the participants, then why do all the networks have a centralized authority managing them? The participants rarely have autonomy.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- fasterik 4y agoI think a more defensible phrase would be "net negative to society". Crypto has its positive uses, but you have to balance those against the negatives of slow transfer speeds, speculative bubbles, scams, energy consumption, and carbon emissions. Also, it needs to be said that Nvidia is probably just jumping on the next marketing bandwagon by pivoting to LLMs after the collapse of crypto. This doesn't seem like a principled stance they are taking.
- logicalmonster 4y agoFWIW, even though I'd probably disagree with your assessment of crypto overall, I love that your comment tries to take a reasonable position: not just blind hate or love. That's what is missing from many crypto discussions on HN because too many people have hitched their assessment of crypto into their personality and can't try and be even the tiniest bit nuanced. I hate that some people blindly want to boost crypto and can't say anything bad about it, and some people want to act like crypto personally shot their dog and is responsible for most of the ills of the world. > Crypto has its positive uses, but you have to balance those against the negatives of slow transfer speeds, speculative bubbles, scams, energy consumption, and carbon emissions. How people balance these things out is subjective, but I see it as a question of values. If for example, you believe that what safety net that crypto offers from government destruction of currencies is of paramount importance, then it might outweigh any conceivable negatives. Conversely, inflation and government destruction of currencies is (IMO still sadly) not even in many peoples' radar screen. Everybody's cost-benefit analysis would be different here because their values and knowledge are different. > Also, it needs to be said that Nvidia is probably just jumping on the next marketing bandwagon by pivoting to LLMs after the collapse of crypto. This doesn't seem like a principled stance they are taking. Agreed. And we can all predict that if/when Crypto makes any kind of big financial comeback, many people who tried to signal their virtue by denouncing it will adjust their public position on crypto and happily make money on it. Hell, I'd be very surprised if the people personally involved in this story don't hold at least some crypto as a "just in case" sort of side-bet even while publicly denouncing it.
- miohtama 4y ago
- everfree 4y ago> “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,” Kagan told the Guardian. No, the crypto mining industry collapsed because the largest GPU-mined cryptocurrency (Ethereum) removed the ability for people to mine it with GPUs. Crypto obviously does not "need parallel processing" in the way that Nvidia GPUs provide it, because Ethereum removed that requirement entirely. Nvidia's statement is like a shovel manufacturer declaring gold mining dead because people are no longer buying shovels (because they moved on to backhoes).
- DeepYogurt 4y agoIt's entirely possible for nvidia to be sour and also correct. Crypto currencies have done nothing for society but to introduce scam and money laundering vectors.
- psychphysic 4y agoOnline dark net markets would not be possible without cryptos. They are a pretty big win for those who believe in personal liberty.
- KyeRussell 4y agoFortunately I don’t think anyone is concerned with what libertarians consider a “big win”.
- mmiliauskas 4y agoExcept for libertarians? Personally, as a libertarian this is all I need -- a win for myself.
- bregma 4y agoNot all libertarians. Any libertarian is of course free to decide for themself if it's a win or not. Some may, and some may not.
- psychlops 4y agoWhy does Alex Hern at the Guardian believe Michael Kagan is an expert on what is best for society?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- vishnugupta 4y agoConvenient of them to pronounce it now as the world has moved on to AI bandwagon which suits Nvidia just fine. I wonder where was this enlightenment couple of years ago when the demand for GPUs was through the roof.
- mdaniel 4y agoI eagerly anticipate the day CUDA no longer has a stranglehold on ML libraries; it's just absurd that one must purchase Magical Hardware when damn near every laptop has a GPU in it just not the GPU
- fnordpiglet 4y agoUtility is perceived by those that find something useful. I’m not a crypto user, but enough people find it useful that I don’t deny it’s utility to someone else. It requires a special kind of arrogance to deny the utility someone else perceives, and those arrogant folks are usually blindsided when that utility becomes broadly perceived.
- frollo 4y agoOk, now tell me something which isn't obvious
- HAL3000 4y agoAs someone that implements smart contracts I can agree with that opinion. Most of cryptocurrency users are using them because of FOMO, they read on social networks sponsored ads about big gains and they enter 21st century casinos created by modern Madoffs, waiting for airdrops in hope to make money etc. Reality is that most lose money but like with gambling maybe the next airdrop or next DeFi project will be a jackpot or this time they will be first adopters and other users will be left holding the bag. It's really sad because technology is great.
- abraxas 4y agoSo called proof of work systems are basically an instantiation of Bostrom's paperclip maximizer running on a hybrid human machine topology.
- 21eleven 4y agoWe have been doing finance for centuries and governance for millennial. The internet has been around for a few decades. If Crypto is going to have meaningful impact on either of those two domains it may take a while. I agree there are many grifter scammy things in crypto. Fwiw it seems plausible to me that crypto/blockchain could provide value eventually as a realtime, open, highly available database about economic activity. Reliable economic information is valuable, scarce and seldom realtime. However this depends on economic entities having an initial reason to make certain transactions on the blockchain and it's unclear what they'd get out of doing that.
- Liberonostrud 4y ago[dead]
- nathias 4y agothis is a strong buy signal
- andersentobias 4y agoI do not own any crypto myself. The grown-up opinion is of course to view all crypto ""investments"" with extreme skepticism, which is an absolutely sane and correct position. With that said, I like the idea of cryptocurrencies simply because they are punk as f*ck, and I'd like whatever leadership in charge to know that they do not have absolute power to run anyone else's life. Apart from magic internet money, I cannot figure out any other way in which to "make myself heard". With every indirection the gov't adds through decision taken by ombudsman/committee, the more power asymmetry is added which just fuels my sense of a system driven by amoral technocrats.
- tptacek 4y agoIt is possible that there is no idea in the history of mankind less punk rock than cryptocurrency.
- everfree 4y agoTo me, they both seem to be about deliberate and organized defiance of social behavioral norms.
- danaris 4y agoThe only social behavioral norms that cryptocurrency is about defying are "people shouldn't be scammed out of their money".
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- yellowapple 4y agoAs opposed to the incumbent socioeconomic system, wherein "people should be scammed out of as much money as possible" is the rule of thumb.
- grumple 4y ago
- Liberonostrud 4y ago[dead]
- sfmike 4y agoInteresting that crypto mining lead to a GPU rush and directly benefited sales of Nvidia GPUs that they would feel this way
- ThorsBane 4y agoNvidia should stick with what they know - producing AI hardware and AI pipelines. This is how Intel got disrupted - by trying too much beyond what they were fundamentally innovating in. There are many useful applications in cryptocurrency tech. We are only at the beginning stages of R&D in this space.
- kkielhofner 4y agoI don't know how anyone can say "we're still early" or "we are only at the beginning stages of R&D in this space" considering crypto is 14 years old and has had marquee VC and other investment to the tune of tens/hundreds of billions of dollars for at least half a decade.
- ThorsBane 4y agoCryptocurrency generation mechanics are 14 years old. Run-time and application deployables on top are not 14 years old. This is a brand new space and it's still in its infancy. Ethereum is an amazing technology.
- kkielhofner 4y agoMoving the goal posts a little but sure. Ethereum is eight years old. The Ethereum foundation alone has a billion dollars. Ethereum and the related ecosystem has had tens of billions of dollars thrown into it. I don’t know how that can be described as “infancy”. The web was opened by CERN in 1993. By 2001 it was being used by over 500 million people daily. Please look at an eth block explorer and tell me how many people are using it daily. I’ll spoil it for you: in terms of the five billion people on the internet, essentially no one. How long is the crypto community going to excuse the complete adoption failure, horrendous and unacceptable behavior, etc with “it’s still early”? Please point to another technology with tens of billions of dollars of investment and almost a decade of development described as being in infancy. I swear we’ll be here in another decade hearing the same thing. If there's anything the crypto community needs to do - stop pumping, shilling, sticking your head in the sand in fantasy land, step out of your echo chamber, and take a good hard look to figure out why no one is using whatever you're building. Maybe then, and only then, will these applications ever step out of complete obscurity.
- codedokode 4y agoWrong. Cryptocurrency demonstrate what electronic payment system should look like: without ability to sell user data and spy on users. Cryptocurrency is the payment system which is designed only for payment without unnecessary features. Today if you pay with card you basically consent to collecting your data by corporations and following you offline and online, creating a detailed history of your activity. Corporations exchange data with each other, so using card on only one site or in one app can make your identity known to hundreds of other sites even when using incognito mode. With face recognition surveillance can be extended even to places where you don't use the card. And there is no way to opt out from it.
- make_it_sure 4y agoI don't give a f*k about someone following my activities, I'm not doing anything illegal, that's why I don't understand this privacy craze going on. The most they can do is show me some personalized ads and I don't care. But the downside is getting scammed, get money stolen and not being able to figure out who did that. That's what anonymity feature of crypto promotes which I think is a much bigger deal, especially if you count all transactions it enables on dark web.
- irusensei 4y ago> that's why I don't understand this privacy craze going on. Because you were born in a stable democracy. Congratulations. Enjoy your privilege.
- salawat 4y ago>I don't give a f*k about someone following my activities Go buy some Cuban cigars. Go start/put on an anti-Modi demonstration in India. You've got nothing to hide exactly because you haven't found yourself on the "wrong side of the tracks" yet. I assure you, the point will come when you sift into a disenfranchised bucket; then you will.
- pixl97 4y agoI'm sorry, you are actually committing crimes because you are (not woke enough || too woke) based on the Online Responsibility Act of 2025 after the _________ party won the presidency, house, and senate. And I mean, I mostly agree with you, crypto seems to be a hive of scum and villainy, at the same time having every moment of our lives tracked to be judged by the whims of the future is a very risky proposition.
- bulbosaur123 4y agoConfiscation resistance is not useful?
- jkepler 4y agoAbout 509 years ago the Dutch invented common stock in companies, creating a new way for humans to work together. That had long-term sociological impact in society. Today, there are people who have created new ways of working together by building on top of bitcoin, where its not a company or a legal entity of any king, but people who may not know or trust each other in meatspace are collaborating and getting paid for their work as they deliver products and services. And their collaboration is governed by humans, not a smart contract, but in a decentralized manner to protect their project. They're developing software, providing customer support, tutorials, project management, etc, and all of it being paid for by the project---all without bank accounts, a corporation, or geographic dependency. As far as I'm aware, https://bisq.network/dao/ https://bisq.network/dao/ is the only running project that gas built functioning governance on top of bitcoin. I know that the MakerDAO (that runs the DAI stablecoin) and ShapeShift (altcoin exchange) have been built and are running in top of Ethereum or other altcoins. So that's at least three separate projects creating value in historically new ways. When I explained this to a sociologist friend of mine, she was amazing, asking who's studying and writing about such historically important innovation. I fail to see how those aren't examples of how this technology benefits society. Its trailblazing, hinting at the new possibilities that combining the Internet with programmable decentralized permissionless censorship-resistant money could bring to humanity. Only time will show which approaches bear long-term fruit here, but there's a lot of potential.
- juujian 4y agolol
- zoklet-enjoyer 4y agoCheck out the cosmos ecosystem/IBC. It's all ran by DAOs
- partiallypro 4y ago> I fail to see how those aren't examples of how this technology benefits society. Can you list examples of how it has helped society as a whole? Nothing you listed has anything to do with helping society. You've listed things you think are good things, but nothing is a society wide benefit. Building on top of Bitcoin or Etherium is great and all... But how does that help the average person? I've seen no trickle down or benefits from crypto that are anything but pure speculation akin to sports gambling.
- cortic 4y ago>Cryptocurrencies add nothing useful to society I wonder what kind of society Nvidia wants? Crypto (some of it) offers a freedom to buy and spend that is not corporately regulated. Some crypto brings huge investment in energy production; Green where the society structures it to be, not green where the society structures it not to be. Did they think gaming brought more value to society? Its nice that AI will 'reinvent nearly every industry', but i suspect it will just become another focusing tool to focus more wealth onto the very wealthy.
- cortic 4y ago*buy and sell
- 0xDEF 4y agoTwo banks with a lot of exposure to risky cryptocurrency startups collapsed and the cryptobros immediately used that to push FUD that all banks will soon collapse and everyone should move their money to crypto. And it worked. Not a single popular movement lies as much as the cryptobros and repeatedly get away with it.
- tock 4y agoThose banks collapsed because they held a lot of long duration bonds which lost value because of the recent rate hikes + there was a bank run.
- m1117 4y agoWhat about all the drug deals and bribes?????
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- rieg3c 4y agoif we agree that crypto != Bitcoin, then yes otherwise, hfsp ;)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- anigbrowl 4y agoAmid a torrent of AI-generated content, cryptographic signatures in cameras strike me as a useful application of blockchain technology. There will always be a market for authenticity because photojournalism has strategic value.
- cesarb 4y ago> cryptographic signatures in cameras strike me as a useful application of blockchain technology As always with "blockchain", you have to ask the question, "couldn't this be done with non-blockchain technologies, at a fraction of the energy cost?" There are as far as I can see two things which could be authenticated: "was this photo taken by a physical camera", and "was this photo taken at a particular moment in time". For the first, the camera could sign the RAW file, and append a certificate signed by the camera's manufacturer; AFAIK, cameras which do that already exist. For the second, cryptographic timestamp services are older than blockchain (RFC 3161, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping for alternatives), and IIRC were used in Windows to timestamp signed binaries, so that they would keep working even after the key used to sign them expired (as long as the signature was timestamped prior to that expiration).
- acje 4y agoTo be fair, cryptocurrencies are not the only category of tools in the financial sector that add nothing useful to society.
- POiNTx 4y agoTo me it's very weird people compare AI to crypto. Except that there's a lot of hype behind them and they're fundamentally a technology (and tend to be run on a GPU), they don't have anything in common. I can say a lot of bad things about crypto but I don't want to regurgitate all of it. But let's just say I don't know anyone who uses it like regular money, but I do know some people who use it as an 'investment' and hedge against fiat. If the thing doesn't have underlying value, it's worthless. Not saying it will never take off, and there are some third world countries that use it, but the state it's in right now is WAY overhyped and 99% of the usecase is ponzi scheme bullshit, scams and FOMO. AI is fundamentally different, it's a complete game changer. My wife who is not technically inclined uses ChatGPT daily for her work. Yesterday there was an article about artists who have been made redundant, and are now using AI to genereate the 'art' for them. This thing has a CRAZY amount of value.
- antibasilisk 4y agoPart of the problem with these sorts of analyses is that it looks as 'crypto' as a class rather than specific cryptos. Monero is actively used as a currency, and I'd say a much higher percentage of its userbase uses it for that purpose compared to other cryptocurrencies.
- permo-w 4y ago> To me it's very weird people compare AI to crypto. Except that there's a lot of hype behind them and they're fundamentally a technology (and tend to be run on a GPU), they don't have anything in common. is that not enough?
- weaksauce 4y ago100% agree. this is like the internet in 1996 or the model T or the printing press... the bottle is now open and we have no idea what it will do but there's no way to put that genie back in. I'm not a bullish person but it seems the impact this will have on society is immeasurable. what happens when a large chunk of the workforce suddenly becomes unneeded? what happens when the propaganda becomes so sophisticated that even trained people can not distinguish it from fiction? in a short timeframe we went from ai generated finger colors to having to check the hands to see if it's ai to having to really struggle to see if it's ai. i don't know. I am a techie and i am not a ludite but feel that just like social media that this will be a net loss for society.
- yieldcrv 4y ago> Crypto, by contrast, was more like high-frequency trading, an industry that had led to a lot of business for Mellanox, the company Kagan founded before it was acquired by Nvidia. Yes, its financial services, which is the biggest sector on the planet. That's never been controversial except to individual contributors that put their head in the sand to financial services. The same arguments of lacking "usefulness" and "utility" are the same ones that some people choose to have against all financial services, which is very far divorced from any reality that matters. Yes, 99% of the financial services sector and all currency has nothing to do with using it as regular money. The same distribution as seen in crypto. It often feels like like people don't know that they are relying on a standard that applies to things they respect. Like, they're criticizing "crypto" while describing the thing they appreciate.
- eftychis 4y agoThis statement is full of hypocrisy and sourness. As I replied to a comment elsewhere on this post: They capitalized to the maximum the demand and ending up seriously cannibalizing their profits, which they hid. They ended up settling with the SEC on the matter. https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/06/tech/nvidia-sec-settlement-crypto-mining/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/06/tech/nvidia-sec-settlement-cr... Specifically, Nvidia had to settle for misleading investors, as they hid that Nvidia's specific for crypto-mining series were cannibalizing gaming and ai profits. Nvidia is also using its monopoly now to dictate what workloads one can run with the hardware they buy. All "to save the world" against distributed protocols, which have left Nvidia behind. I find that disturbing and problematic. At what point will Nvidia demand a subscription model to allow one to use their screen or game or train and host their own LLaMa model?
- olalonde 4y agoHere we go again...
- menzoic 4y agoComplete ignorance, byzantine fault tolerance is a great addition to society. No need to rely on intermediaries for trusted communication. This is not limited to financial transactions. Clear benefits to society are: oppression resistant voting systems, decentralized energy grid (solar power redistributed), reliable property rights (for under-developed / corrupt countries), transparent supply chain management (avoid counterfeits, traceability of sources, theft…etc)
- stillbourne 4y agoIt says after catering to miners over gamers for the last 5 years.
- mrcaosr 4y agooh now companies can talk too? i think it was nvidia's ceo who said like a year ago (maybe more) that eth would be worth 8k usd soon... but agreed, not saying anything about its 'usefulness' THE US DOLLAR ADDS NOTHING USEFUL TO SOCIETY. how about that?
- martin82 4y agoHe is right. Bitcoin, however, does add something invaluable to society.
- red-iron-pine 4y agoMan the shillbots are going hard in this one. There have been some heated crypto discussions on HN for sure, but this is something else.
- jacknews 4y agoI'm fairly sure they could have made this call 3 years ago, but I guess there wasn't a hot new alterntive use for GPUs to keep prices high then.