“There’s no way to get there without a breakthrough,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said, arguing that AI will soon need even more energy.
We must disassemble the solar system and make
paperclipsAI server farmsI love when people invent something then complain about how dangerous it is. It really hits you in the feels.
In the end, as always, it will only benefit the companies. And all the people get is put out of a job because they have been replaced by some piece of software no one even understands anymore.
This is a silly take, people have benefitted hugely from all the big tech developments in the past and will do from ai also - just as you have a mobile phone that can save and improve your life in a myriad of ways so you’ll have access to various forms of ai which will do similar. GPS is a good example, functionally free and making navigation far safer, faster, and better.
Here’s a genuine already happened use case for ai benefitting you, an open source developer was able to add a whole load of useful features to their free software by using AI to help code - I know because it was me, among many many others.
I know people making open source ai tools too and they’re all using AI coding assistants - mostly the free ones. I’ve seen a lot of academic researchers using AI tools also generally built using open source tools like pytorch and with help from ai coding tools. Even if you don’t use ai yourself you’re already benefitting from it, even if you don’t use open source software the services you rely on do.
Imagine being able to implement the most advanced and newest methodologies in your design process or get answers to complex and niche questions about new technology instantly. You buy a printer for example and say to your computer ‘I’ve plugged in a printer make it work’ and it says ‘ok, there isn’t a driver available that’ll work with your pc but I’ve written one based on the spec in the datasheet, do you want me to print a test page?’
Imagine being able to say ‘talk me through diagnosing a fault on my washing machine’ and it guides you through locating and fixing the fault, possibly by designing a replacement part and giving you fabrication options.
Or being able to say ‘this website is annoying, change it so that I only see the video window’ or ‘make a playlist in release order of all abba songs that charted’ or ‘check on currently available archives to see if there’s a mirror of this deleted post’ or ‘check all the sites and see if anyone posted a sub version of the next episode of this anime’ or ‘Keep an eye on this lemmy community and add any popular memes involving fish to my feed but don’t bother with any meta stuff or aquatic mammals’ or ‘this advert says I can make free money, is it ligit?’
The use cases that will directly benefit your life are almost endless, natural language computing is a huge deal even without task based solvers and physical automation but we also have those too so the increased ability of people to make community projects and freely shared designs is huge.
wasn’t the same thing said about ATM’s? and then it created the need for banks to hire more employees?
iirc, technology/robots has only been able to create more jobs, right? or am I misinformed?
The difference is the type of the job. Do we want to make jobs available for the general population and requiring minimal training, or do we want to make jobs available only for those with very difficult-to-get engineering degrees?
dude think about this stuff before you open the floodgates bro
That requires someone in business to think beyond the next quarter’s profits.
That requires someone in business to think
I’m not convinced that Altman has cleared this beyond meaningless buzzwords
hey guys, theres this thing called nuclear energy. It’s pretty cool.
Can’t do it. Makes the boomers wet themselves. Jane Fonda made a movie about it after she got back from aiding and firing on US troops.
Thorium molten salt reactor
love a good thorium based metal cooled reactor
Massively subsidized and where do you put all the nuclear waste? Nuclear energy is dumb even without thinking about possible disasters. You are just falling for grifters who don’t want us to use renewable sources of energy. And before you say it: no, nuclear energy is not green. You would know that if you actually googled for like 5 seconds, but it’s easier to believe grifters promising “the one easy solution to solve all our problems”, right?
Massively subsidized
Nuclear energy is four times cheaper than renewables when externalities like baseline generation are imputed: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0360544222018035?via%3Dihub
where do you put all the nuclear waste?
While more dangerous, the quantity of waste generated compared to all other forms of energy generation is very small. Storage is a solved problem, but you have probably read articles about a lack of storage in the U.S. This is entirely due to politicians’ failure to agree on where to store waste. Despite the relative safety, no one wants nuclear waste stored in their “back yard.”
And before you say it: no, nuclear energy is not green.
Nuclear energy generates zero CO2. Surely we can agree that this is the most pressing consideration in terms of climate change. If your concern is the nuclear waste, then I direct you to the growing problem of disposing of solar cells and wind turbines. Newer turbine blades, for example, are 40 meters long and weigh 2.5 tons. These cannot be recycled.
No matter how you cut the data, nuclear is an order of magnitude better than almost all other forms of energy generation. If our goal is to radically improve our environmental footprint while keeping the lights on even at night when it’s not windy, then nuclear absolutely must be part of the mix.
This guy knows his shit
Unfortunately he does only know how to misrepresent shit. This is of course all bullshit, and at best outdated information that does not take the massively falling price of renewable energy into account. Nuclear can be a transition helper, IF and only IF you already have running reactors.
Let’s see your data
We could’ve had those reactors if people didn’t say the same things you’re saying 30 years ago.
Wierd spin you put on all of that. Burn the solar panels and blades. Reclaim the energy in heat and its still way safer than nuclear waste.
You can’t be serious, can you? First off you would need pretty higher temperatures to burn glass. Secondly the fumes and dust it would put out would be nasty.
Yeah, still not radioactive nasty though. Don’t get how you are all so naive. The only reason most countries have a nuclear program is so they have nuclear weapons.
The only reason most countries have a nuclear program is so they have nuclear weapons.
The only reason most countries have a nuclear program capable of generating plutonium products is to build nuclear weapons*
FTFY
You are right it isn’t very radioactive and a lot harder to control, not like I designed air scrubbers for 4 years of my life or something.
The only reason most countries have a nuclear program is so they have nuclear weapons.
Citation needed.
A pity decades of OPEC propaganda has worked so well.
Ahh you’re not naive you are biased. Anything you say is effectively propaganda. Jog on.
deleted by creator
If we look at just Europe, Slovakia, Finland, and Belarus all brought new reactors online last year alone. There are another six reactors currently under construction, and another 33 planned. France and Sweden recently announced their strategic commitment to nuclear power for a variety of reasons.
One major technological breakthrough is Small Modular Reactors (SMRs). These are far more cost effective, very safe (the reactor shuts down in the event of loss of power and coolant), and require a much smaller footprint. Rolls-Royce is on target to deliver the first of these in 2030.
The example you provide is an example of poor governance, not an inherent limitation of the technology. There are also examples of poor governance regarding renewable energy all over the world.
Will the reactors come with the little lady at the front?
Oh wow a government cost overrun. THIS HAS NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE!
mostly because nobody knows how to build a reactor properly anymore… Wonder why that happened.
Let’s talk about the technology instead of the dumb word “nuclear”. Thorium fission > uranium fission.
you put the nuclear waste in a hole, deep underground, after burning most of it up. Modern gen 4 designs can burn the vast majority of existing waste products down to a much more reasonable time span.
Nuclear energy is vastly more green than, coal, gas, petro, etc… Currently arguably more sustainable than massive amounts of solar and wind energy. Wind in particular has a massive waste issue, solar, it’s more complicated but there are a lot of precious metals involved and heavy refining done. It’s not a zero emissions industry either. The actual production of electricity IS net zero, unlike coal, petro, and gas, which still powers the majority of our grids. Please continue to explain to me how fossil fuels are better than funny green rock.
You’re also accusing me of knowing nothing about nuclear, which is funny, considering i have quite the autistic hyper-fixation on it. And know vastly more about it than the average person. Judging by your response, you’re probably not in the field of nuclear energy either.
Nuclear is a technology we know how to build, understand how to operate safely, and are capable of doing correctly. The only thing we need, is more nuclear plants.
No need to follow the laws of physics anymore, it’s losing us money!
deleted by creator
So is AI the new Blockchain?
Always was.
Unlike the Blockchain it has an actual use tho.
I bought pizza with bitcoin, haven’t bought anything with AI yet.
I get daily use out of LLMs but haven’t done anything with Bitcoin.
I want to use Bitcoin to buy cannabis and Soylent and have it arrive at my door via drone. Give me my better future
Give an LLM to a high school student and they could do something with it.
Try to explain block chain to an adult and watch them pretend to understand.
Didn’t CERN open a portal to hell recently, can’t we just steal their power? What are they using it for what could go wrong?
Reminds me of the Castle Animated series on YouTube.
Do we even need a portal to hell, aren’t we living in one?!
It’s more of a purgatory, or maybe fantasy has no part in dealing with reality
Yeah but our hell is out of power. Who cares about that other hell
We could just install some heat pumps in hell and transport the energy via flux pipeline to the overworld.
Argent Energy is extremely clean but it isn’t ethical, COWARD LIBRALS will complain that it’s made from the eternal tortured souls of the dead
Didn’t CERN open a portal to hell recently, can’t we just steal their power?
That’s too similar to the plot of Doom and we all know what happened there.
At least in Doom they had sense enough to do it on Mars
Big Geothermal will try to silence you on this one.
How many kilowatt hours are in hell I wonder?
All
Finally some scifi bullshit he is spewing might actually lead to a good outcome
It’s called nuclear energy. It was discovered in 1932 and properly harnessed with an effective reactor that consumes both radioactive material and waste (CANDU) in 1950’s/1960’s and the newest CANDU reactors are some of the safest and most efficient energy generation in the world.
Pretending like there needs to be a larger investment into something like cold fusion in order to run these computers is incredibly dishonest or presenting a clear hole in education coverage. (The DoE should still work on researching cold fusion, but not because of this.)
Yeah, nuclear has been available and in use over the period of the sharpest increase in co2 emissions. It’s not responsible for it, but it’s not the answer. The average person can’t harness nuclear energy. But all the renewable energies in the world can fit on a small house: wind, solar, hydro. Why bring radioactive materials into this?
We have a system to distribute electricity
But why continue to rely on a system of profit that is being run like a mob, being split into distinct territories where “free market capitalism” can’t even allow us to not get gouged by profit seekers? Why not generate our own power? Why not 100% renewables? Like I said, why bring radioactive materials into this? For that matter, why bring capitalism into it?
My comment was referring to when you mentioned the average person not being able to harvest nuclear energy as an argument against it.
I’m 100% for broad solar adaptation and even laws forcing new homes to be built with them. The other renewables you mention aren’t harvestable by the average person either sadly.
I think nuclear is an important tool for running clean societies. Industries need a lot of power and I can also see mini reactors being bought by small towns for their citizens. It has its uses when the renewables aren’t pheasible but the best is always solar or wind farms and hydro for sure.
I love nuclear but China is building them as fast as they can and they’re still being massively outpaced by their own solar installations. If we hadn’t shut down most of the research and construction in the 80’s it would have been great, but it’s not going to be a solution to the huge power requirement growth from EVs and shit like AI in the “short” term of 1-20 years.
Solar alone can’t meet humanity’s energy needs without breakthroughs in energy storage.
Most energy we use the grid for is generated on demand. That means only a few moments ago, the electricity powering your computer was just a lump of coal in a furnace.
If we don’t have the means to store enough energy to meet demands when the sun isn’t out or wind isn’t blowing, then we need more sources of energy than just sun and wind.
There is a lot of misinformation being perpetuated by the solar industry to fool people like you into thinking all investments should be directed to it over other options.
Please educate yourself before parroting industry talking points that only exist to take people for a ride.
There is growing scientific consensus that 100% renewables is the most cost effective option.
Grid storage doesn’t have the same weight limitations that EVs do, which opens up a lot more paths. Flow batteries, for one, might be all we need. They’re already gearing those up for mass production, so we don’t need any further breakthroughs (though they’re always nice if they come).
Getting to 95% is surprisingly easy; there are non-linear factors at work to getting that last 5%, but you wouldn’t need to use other sources very much at all. The wind often blows when the sun doesn’t shine. We have tons of historical weather data about how these two combine in a given region, which means we can calculate the maximum expected lull between the two. Double that amount and put in enough storage to cover it. This basic plan was simulated in Australia, and it gets there for an affordable cost.
Then we can worry about that last 5%.
Nuclear advocates have been using the same talking points since the 90s, and have missed how the economics have been swept out from underneath them.
Supplying energy isn’t only doing what’s “cost effective.” It’s about meeting demand.
This is why when suppliers have difficulty meeting demand, prices go up.
If we only did what was the cheapest instead of what was required to meet demand, then our demands wouldn’t be met and we would be without energy during those times.
Check the second link again. They were calculating how demand was met over time.
In Australia a mostly open, sparsely populated, continent sized island with vast amounts of sun wind and hydro, with people mostly gathered in a small band of the coast on one side (and still even then needed 1/3 of total generating capacity backed by fossil fuels).
It’s great that oz can maybe get away with almost entirely renewable (maybe, that simulation is essentially just multiplying current generation by a large number, adding some storage and saying that mostly takes generation above demand, it doesn’t do any sort of analysis of when where or how that energy is generated or makes its way to the sources of demand), but it’s not a model for the rest of the world.
It’s important to keep in context who is building them, how they’re being built, and with what oversight they are built.
We are in no way perfect in the west but we are easily a century ahead in insuring build quality and regulatory oversight.
Microsoft is actually looking at dedicated SMRs to run AI server farms, but could we fucking not?
Exactly. This is why the AI hype train is overblown. Stop shoving “AI” everywhere when they know it’ll cost a lot in electricity.
The real path forwards with AI will be specialized super advanced models costing hundreds per run (business use case) and/or locally run AI using NPUs, especially the latter.
pocket nuke plants… have to be the stopgap between here and fusion. are there still people working on those car-sized nuke plants for a more distributed system?
This is probably why he’s invested so much into Helion Energy, who are trying to make a small and cheap nuclear fusion reactor.
make a small and cheap nuclear fusion reactor
Aneutronic fusion isn’t happening on this planet. We don’t even have the fuel for it. It’s a dumb thing to market when we can’t even break even on D-T fusion and turning the neutrons into heat.
It blows my mind honestly. This is such a young technology that commercialization at this point seems ridiculous
While I’m too much of an optimist to say that we’ll never figure out viable fusion power, I do think you’re more right than wrong.
Fission power is essentially us discharging a fusion battery, where the battery was charged by a supernova. We don’t get any free help with fusion, and we have to replicate input energies only seen in nature with stellar amounts of gravitational mass. It is (IMO) an important area of research, but I don’t expect it to power our cities in my lifetime.
Yeah, but what they’re marketing specifically is aneutronic fusion. That’s helium fusion, which has never been demonstrated outside of a star. Hydrogen fusion, which we haven’t actually achieved much with beyond bombs is more managable. The difference is hydrogen fusion creates a big neutron flux, which needs to be isolated (the small part) and creates waste by neutron activating whatever it’s around (the cheap part, volume wise hydrogen fusion creates more radioactive waste than fission but it’s much easier to manage low level waste).
It doesn’t help that the helium is a primordial resource that has literally escaped the crust of our planet and floated out into space. Supposedly the moon has more.
The human brain uses about 20W. Maybe AI needs to be more efficient instead?
Perfect let’s use human brains as CPUs then. Not the whole brain just the unused bits.
I would love it (if there exists a FOSS variant of that) imagine being able to run a LLM, or even LAM in your head,
wait…
🤔
FOSS Neuralink
We use all of our brain. Well, some of us try to anyway.
I’ve seen that film
Flubber!
It’s what matrix would’ve been if the studios didn’t think people would too dumb to get it, so we ended with the nonsense about batteries.
They also thought we wouldn’t understand how Switch could be a woman in the matrix but a man in the real world. So they just made the character a butch woman because apparently that’s easier somehow. So many little changes like this were made.
Holy fuck now her name makes so much more sense. God dammit, why are we so fucking stuck up as a society that we couldn’t even keep that
Tbf that society was a while ago now.
I don’t think it’s gotten better, and honestly they oversimplify even more today. For some reason
That would require a revolutionary discovery in material science and hardware.
It’d be way easier to just grow brains instead
And yet we have brains. This brute force approach to machine learning is quite effective but has problems scaling. So, new energy sources or new thinking?
We just run the AI for a gazillion epochs and then it’s
overfittedevolved intelligence. Thanks Darwin we did it again.
We invented computers to do things human brains either couldn’t do, or couldn’t do fast enough.
Get rid of bitcoin and you solve the energy problem.
Can we get rid of AI too?
I would also like this
Maybe Satoshi Nakamoto was an AI all along…
