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I’ve played this game and know where it’s headed. They’ve decided to create Vega. Prepare for them to announce Argent Energy soon.
Mega corporations should not be allowed to use nuclear power plants purely for themselves.
Also, if you need that much power to do something bthat a human brain does with under 100 watts, I really think you’re doing it wrong
Organic technology is hard. If you can figure out how to grow a compute system you will take human technology hundreds of years into the future. Silicon tech is the stone age of compute.
The brain has a slow clock rate to keep within its power limitations, but it is a parallel computational beast compared to current models.
It takes around ten years for new hardware to really take shape in our current age. AI hasn’t really established what direction it is going in yet. The open source offline model is the likely winner, meaning the hardware design and scaling factors are still unknown. We probably won’t see a good solution for years. We are patching video hardware as a solution until AI specific hardware is readily available.
I am so excited for the advances that neuromorphic processors will bring, which is not exactly my field, but adjacent to it. The concept of modelling chips after the human brain instead of traditional computing doctrines sounds extremely promising, and I would love to get to work on systems like Intel’s Loihi or IBM’s TrueNorth! If you think about it, it’s a bit ridiculous how corporations like Nvidia are currently approaching AI with graphics processors. I mean, it makes more sense than general-purpose CPUs, but it is at the very least a subideal solution.
I bet it’d be a whole lot easier to grow and organic computer if you didn’t have to worry about pesky things like people thinking you grew genetically engineered slaves.
Almost all nuclear power plants in the US are privately owned and operated. Regardless of whether you agree with it or not, this isn’t new
The whole language model scene system started with “we accidently found something that kinda works” and is now in full “somebody please accidently find a way so it uses less power” mode.
If you’re so smart why don’t you come up with a way to do it under 100 watts???
Also this is training them not using them. Using an ai consumes significantly less power than the process to train it sort of like how humans take more to learn than to put something in practice.
People tend to forgot the millions of years of horribly inefficient evolution it took to develop the human brain.
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Don’t think the point that’s being made is “smarturr” but rather that stay within the margins of available power.
I think his point is that the person he responded to is proposing well meaning feeling based policies without having any real knowledge of any of the negative impacts his policy would have.
I feel like I’m in that butterfly meme, going like is this what reasonable conversation is like.
<3
Not a terrible argument. How do we limit compute vs. output?
Why should they not be allowed? Nuclear power plants are great options and will mean less demand on worse energy providing sources
Because safety and profits aren’t going in the same direction. They would cut corner for reduce the costs. Which is how you end with a nuclear accident. And then it would be to the tax payer to kick the bill.
Microsoft is big enough that government would force them to pay up. There is just too much public pressure for that kind of disaster to get waved away.
Also, there are nuclear options that are far safer than water-based reactors. WCRs are literally the worst possible design for a nuclear reactor, and we were stupid enough to choose that over dry material reactors in the 60s.
Microsoft is big enough that government would force them to pay up.
Lmao
Just like they made the banks pay up? Like how they make oil companies pay up?
Right now it’s commonplace for oil rigs and nuclear plants to be decommissioned on the taxpayer, sometimes entirely funded by them even, rather than by the company.
SMRs are pretty safe. That’s not the issue. It’s that they’re thinking about using a whole fucking nuclear reactor to train AI to sell you shit.
Also, if you need that much power to do something bthat a human brain does with under 100 watts, I really think you’re doing it wrong
Show me at least 1 person that is capable of doing everything that something like ChatGPT can do.
I would take longer, but I bet I could do it. All ChatGPT does it’s basically regurgitate StackOverflow answers at you, and I’ve been doing that for years in my professional life
All ChatGPT does it’s basically regurgitate StackOverflow answers at you
All it does, eh? It doesn’t do anything else? I don’t think you’ve ever used ChatGPT. It has more knowledge and capabilities than any single human. Yes, a single human can have more expertise in one or bunch of the topics, but no human brain can have as much general knowledge as ChatGPT. And unlike us, it can improve, there’s no limit.
Oh my Gwyn, this comment section is just amazing.
Yeah, every time AI or nuclear energy is mentioned the quality of the comments plummets. Since we have the two combined in this story, the results are tragically predictable.
The reason is ultimately irrelevant, but I welcome more nuclear energy.
Right, let’s welcome throwing millions or billions of dollars at wasting enormous quantities of concrete and water and at generating highly toxic waste that will irradiate its environment for millennia, and at ripping apart landscapes to extract uranium, I mean that’s such a nice thing, we need much more of it! It’s not like we already have perfectly renewable solutions to providing power…
They could just invest in a solar farm or something, they are just a lot more economical.
Nuclear is okay, but the costs compared to renewables are very high, and you have to put a lot of effort and security into building a reactor, compared to a solar panel that you can basically just put up and replace if it snaps.
You probably know this discussion already through.
Edit: Glad to see a nice instance of the discussion going here.
In their specific use case that won’t really work.
They want to use all of their available property for server racks. Covering the roof with solar won’t give enough power/area for them. A small reactor would use a tiny fraction of the space, and generate several times the power. That’s why it’d be worth the extra cost.
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are you arguing solar is more economical than nucleae cause if so youre wrong by a longshot
No, you are. Solar is much cheaper than nuclear is.
Yeah, I don’t know where nuclear advocates got the idea that their preferred method is the cheapest. It’s ludicrously untrue. Just a bunch of talking points that were designed to take on Greenpeace in the 90s, but were never updated with changing economics of energy.
I can see why Microsoft would go for it in this use case. It’s a steady load of power all the time. Their use case is also of questionable benefit to the rest of humanity, but I see why they’d go for it.
The people who actually put money into energy projects are signalling their preferences quite clearly. They took a look at nuclear’s long history of cost and schedule overruns, and then invested in the one that can be up and running in six months. The US government has been willing to issue licenses for new nuclear if companies have their shit in order. Nobody is buying.
Yes, because humans in a capitalist society are always well known for making the best decisions possible based on the good of humankind. Nothing else factors in whatsoever.
For anyone too thick, profit. Profit factors in above literally everything else. And short term profit at that. We shouldn’t make decisions of what’s best for society based on what massive corporations decide is best for their bottom line.
If you’re implying nuclear would be the better option outside of profit motive, please stop. We have better options now.
If we cleared every hurdle and started building reactors en mass, it would be at least five years before a single GW came online. Often more like ten. Solar and wind will use that time to run the table.
Edit: Also, this is a thread about a company dedicating a nuclear reactor to training AI models to sell people shit. This isn’t the anti-capitalist hill to die on.
The article here is literally talking about a company that wants to.
Invest in a next generation technology that is yet unproven, but hopes to solve the financial problems that have plagued traditional reactor projects. And years away from actual implementation, if it happens at all.
That was true 20 years ago. You are working off extremely outdated information.
Sucks to wait for the sun to come out to make Bing answer though. “Disclaimer: Answer dependent on cloud cover or night time”.
You’d get used to it awfully fast though.
Do you seriously think that Bing trains an AI model when you send a request? Why would they do that?
Oh, they’re working on it. It’s dumb, but it’s happening.
I can’t imagine they are. What would the training data of those models be? Why would you train the model when the user sent a request? Why would you wait responding to the request until the model is trained?
Often, these models are a feedback loop. The input from one search query is itself training data that affects the result of the next query.
Sure, but that’s not done with the kind of model this thread is about (separate training and inference). You’re talking about classical ML models with continuous updates, which you wouldn’t run on this kind of GPU infrastructure.
The more people who invest the better the tech becomes the more the price comes down. Nuclear is excellent base energy
This is false. Nuclear has a very competitive levelized cost of energy (LCOE). Nuclear has high upfront costs but fuel is cheap and the reactor can last much longer than solar panels. The big picture matters not just upfront costs.
Source: https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2015/08/f25/LCOE.pdf
Yo better check your fuel prices: https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2023/09/21/why-uranium-prices-are-soaring
Plus imagine how expensive uranium will get once we start relying on nuclear. It’ll be the new oil.
Not only that, imagine how thrilled nature and the environment will be at massive extraction efforts ripping apart landscapes to provide fuel for a method of generating power that is obsolete since at least three decades by now.
Don’t need to, just down-blend from the available fuel used from weapons put out of commission as a result of disarmament treaties.
Now, about those materials used to construct solar panels…
Raw material is usually a small fraction of the cost of refueling. I would also argue that the Russian-Ukrainian conflict is a small blip in the lifetime of a reactor, ~80 years. Transient pricing will have a negligible effect on the LCOE.
For those who haven’t seen this discussion before, I feel like doing the next step in the dance. Cheers Plex.
It’s important to note that nuclear is capable of satisfying baseload demand, which is particularly important for things like a commercial AI model training facility, which will be scheduled to run at full blast for multiple nines.
Solar+storage is considerably more unreliable than a local power plant (be it coal, gas, hydro, or nuclear). I have solar panels in an area that gets wildfire smoke (i.e. soon to be the entire planet), and visible smoke in the air effectively nullifies solar.
Solar is fantastic for covering the amount of load that is correlated with insolation: for example colocated with facilities that use air-conditioning (which do include data centers, but the processing is driving the power there).
While you are right about baseload being more satisfiable through nuclear, you are wrong that it’s in any way important for AI model training. This is one of the best uses for solar energy: you train while you have lots of energy, and you pause training while you don’t. Baseload is important for things that absolutely need to get done (e.g. powering machines in hospitals), or for things that have a high startup cost (e.g. furnaces). AI model training is the opposite of both, so baseload isn’t relevant at all.
It’s not life-critical but it is financially-critical to the company. You aren’t going to build a project on the scale of a data center that is capable of running 24/7 and not run it as much as possible.
That equipment is expensive, and has a relatively short useful lifespan even if not running.
This is why tire factories and refineries run three shifts, this isn’t a phenomenon unique to data centers.
It’s not life-critical but it is financially-critical to the company. You aren’t going to build a project on the scale of a data center that is capable of running 24/7 and not run it as much as possible.
Sorry, but that’s wrong. You’ll run it as much as is profitable. If electricity cost goes up, there is a point where you’ll stop running it, since it becomes too expensive. Even more so considering that AI models don’t have a set goal to reach - you train them as long as you want and can, but training a little bit extra will have diminishing returns after a while.
That equipment is expensive, and has a relatively short useful lifespan even if not running.
Not really, the limiting factors in AI training are mostly supply of cards. The cards already in use will stay in use until they fail, they won’t be replaced with newer cards the second they get released.
This is why tire factories and refineries run three shifts, this isn’t a phenomenon unique to data centers.
This is comparing apples and oranges, since tire factories:
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have long-term planning and production goals to reach
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have employees who must be planned
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have resource input costs that are higher than electricity
Of course you want the highest utilisation that you can economically reach, but a better comparison would be crypto mining - which also has expensive equipment that has a relatively short useful lifespan even if not running, and yet they stop mining when electricity is too expensive.
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“And you pause training while you dont.” lmao I don’t know why people keep giving advice in spaces they’ve never worked in.
What are you trying to imply? That training Transformer models necessarily needs to be a continuous process? You know it’s pretty easy to stop and continue training, right?
I don’t know why people keep commenting in spaces they’ve never worked in.
No datacenter is shutting off of a leg, hall, row, or rack because “We have enough data, guys.” Maybe at your university server room where CS majors are interning. These things are running 24/7/365 with UU tracking specifically to keep them up.
What are you talking about? Who said anything close to “we have enough data, guys”?
Are you ok? You came in with a very snippy and completely wrong comment, and you’re continuing with something completely random.
While I appreciate them going a greener route, if these chat AIs are still this inefficient to simply train, maybe it is best left to return them back to the research phrase.
That makes zero sense
You say “simply train,” but really, the training of these models is The most intensive part. Once they are trained, they require less power (relatively) to actually run for inference.
So it sounds like they need a shitload of GPU power. You know what also costs a shitload of GPU power crypto mining? Could they not outsource the work to all those GPUs that stopped mining crypto once it plummeted?
I am surprised this hasn’t become a community project already. I assume there is some limitation that I am unaware of.
The limitation is intellectual property. You need to model to train it, and no for-profit company is going to just give that away.
But they (MS) are planning on doing it either way, why not crowdsource and even pay a small pittance for the GPU power? I think it would be popular… there are a lot of sad people with extra GPUs sitting around not being used for much.
There’s tradeoffs. If training LLMs (and similar systems that feed on pure physics data) can improve nuclear processes, then overall it could be a net benefit. Fusion energy research takes a huge amount of power to trigger every test ignition and we do them all the time, learning little by little.
The real question is if the LLMs are even capable of revealing those kinds of insights to us. If they are, nuclear is hardly the worst path to go down.
Yesssss
I don’t give a shit about training AI but the idea of Microsoft running nuclear reactors is hilarious to me. Either they do it well and we all benefit from the knowledge, or Windows goes out with a bang
Building and maintaining one isn’t really the concern I have with this one, nuclear reactors are incredibly safe these days. What are they going to do with the nuclear waste? That’s the real issue here. Governments can barely figure that out, how’s a megacorp going to do that in an ethical way? I already see them dumping it in a cave in some poor country in africa.
I mean you say that as if just burying it isn’t actually the proven safest option.
Startups are already beginning to explore using old oil drilling equipment to sink nuclear waste below where it’ll pose a threat, after it’s been suffused into a shitton of concrete of course.
Very rarely is nuclear waste of the corium toothpaste variety, more often it’s the old hazmat suits that are getting replaced and need to be disposed of with special care, or expired rods you can still have limited contact with without many issues.
How much nuclear waste are we talking about? Every time I’ve seen any actual quantity mentioned, it’s tiny.
And relative to coal’s radioactivity, it’s essentially nothing.
As noted elsewhere, these don’t create the same kind of spent fuel as a PWR. So that helps.
But also, the people who designed the PWRs didn’t just say “and then we’ll make shitloads of unmanageable waste lol!” Up until the Carter Administration, we ran a system called “reprocessing” that essentially shredded and dissolved the old fuel rods, isolated the metals chemically, and packed out separately.
France does this. Finland does this. Japan does this. Their waste concerns are negligible compared to ours.
Meanwhile Carter, bless his heart, determined that reprocessing was a proliferation risk, and shut down the US industry, saying “y’all will figure out a way to dispose of these things”.
So now we are using circular saws to hack these things apart, cramming them into barrels stuffed with kitty litter (you read that right), and hoping that nothing will happen to the barrels for 50 million years?
Long-term waste disposal became an impossible problem to solve in the US because our one and only allegedly nuclear-savvy president made the solution to the problem illegal. It became one immediately, and has never stopped being one.
They’ll ship it to India/Thailand
Governments can barely figure that out,
Governments aren’t exactly known for efficiency. A corporation is less likely to bogged down by just the mere fallacy that “other entities can’t figure it out, why should they do it?”
I’m generally against nuclear–or more accurately, think the economics of it no longer make sense–but there’s one thing I think we should do: subsidize reactors that process waste. It’s better and more useful than tossing it in a cave and hoping for the best. Or the current plan of letting it sit around.
Nuclear waste is a technically solved issue with long term geological storage, long term dangerous waste which requires more tech is a very small mass. The problems are political, uneducated people are irrationally scared of those waste that they associate with Chernobyl so they oppose any kind of geological storage, and politicians don’t have the balls to openly contradict them.
Weird thing is, I’d trust them to not abandon the reactor during a budget shutdown…
If they’re actually using a new type nuclear reactor, the small portable ones, then the waste is both incredibly small and recyclable. Nuclear technology has come a long way since the decades old reactors, we just haven’t built very many new ones to showcase that.
It’s a shame we aren’t seemingly taking them into consideration in the whole energy transition crisis we are in.
But rather let’s just keep sending people into hazardous coal mines while ignoring nuclear energy until the solution to all our problems magically comes to us.
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Solution already magically arrived. It’s called nuclear
What do you mean by this, nuclear of all things is supposed to be the solution? Maybe fusion some day, but definitely not fission. But that’s fine, because we already have a perfectly capable and renewable solution, and that is called wind and solar. The sun is doing fusion every day for us and irradiates the surface of the Earth so much that we could support many multiples of our civilisation.
I’m not trying to say nuclear is the definitive solution, but it’s certainly a step in the right direction. Progress is progress, we don’t have to find the final solution in one go.
Small Modular Reactor technology is the future, and it’s really promising.
Self-contained (no onsite refueling), mass produced (cheap, higher quality), and modular (add more for more power, or small enough to power a data center).
Here’s some quick videos from a professor of Nuclear Energy covering topic:
Small Modular Tractors:
Micro-Modular Rectors:
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://youtu.be/TYnqJ4VnRM8?si=qODxzqzOCoiNMinH
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Capitalism will make humans extinct at this rate.
We’ve probably got about 10yrs of normalcy left. Economically, we’re already deviating. Greed is what destroyed us all.
I’m not opposed to new nuclear energy in principle. However Microsoft, an unrelentingly bad organization that consistently acts in bad faith to its customers, employees and businesses parters, and is seemingly dedicated to making awful products that never meaningfully improve, is not something I would trust to do nuclear safely.
I will never forgive them for telling Microsoft Games to stop developing Freelancer 2.
VSCode is cool, no ?
Thankfully, any actual new type using modern tech have self-limiting reactions. Thorium ones, for example, can’t meltdown because the high heat in that process kills the reaction itself.
Is this the new crypto mining is bad story?
Yeah, there’s definitely some parallels between how people negatively reacted to crypto and the current wave of reactions towards AI. My personal theory is that a lot of people are becoming hostile towards big tech, and anything that’s seen as the next big thing in tech will quickly get negative reactions.
Youre missing the obvious lol
I honestly think crypto (as a currency, not an investment opportunity) has real useful potential. A non-government controlled form of money that can be used internationally and privately is actually really useful. Problem is everyone started buying into it as a pyramid scheme investment instead of buying into it for its value as a form of currency. Blockchain has some other uses too, I know some privacy focused apps use it for syncing user privately.
AI also has great potential, it can do things that were otherwise not possible with modern tech. It’s definitely not as efficient as the other methods, but that’s a moot point when regular computer systems aren’t capable of something and an AI system can.
Biggest issue with both is that they’re a technology that’s suited to specific things, but the “all-in on crypto” or “all-in-on-ai” approach is wasteful and causes a lot of problems along the way.
Only if you think developing small nuclear reactors is a bad thing. I think it’s a good thing.
A corporation running a nuclear reactor to train AIs might just be the most cyberpunk news headline I’ve ever seen.
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This gave me an idea for some level design I might want to use in a video game.
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I just like element-based levels in video games. Even water levels. Some even can present some time-based challenges, like saving a nuclear reactor from meltdown, or retrieving something from an area like that.
I wanna play your game lol
LLM seemed really impressive at first, but it made it to “this year’s NFTs” in record time.
It’s grim to think the driver for renewable energy will be the demand for endless AI synthesized child porn.
I predict that within 10 years, computers will be twice as powerful, ten thousand times larger, and so expensive that only the 5 richest kings of Europe will own them
Will the LLMs be useful for dating?
I guess history does repeat itself. Next you’ll be telling me that 640GB of RAM is enough.
Someone let me know when personal computers need TB of RAM
!Remindthem 6 years
Windows 13 isn’t that far away.
