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.
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.)
Might be because it's a LLM not an AI and requires massive amounts of data to be funneled into it to actually work. My admittedly limited understanding of it makes it seem like it's just another buzzword for things like neural networks and machine learning.
The positive thing there is that it probably paces our development. If we can't get to true AGI without way more energy than we can currently produce, then we don't have true AGI risk right now.
There's still risk because it might not be true or we might be able to get close enough to do damage. But slowing down AI is fine by me.
Wow, I fucking hate this guy the more he opens his mouth. He can seriously fuck off right now, if he thinks AI realistically needs him at this point he's sadly mistaken.
The process is ludicrously energy intensive, with experts estimating that the industry could soon suck up as much electricity as an entire country.
Unperturbed, billionaires including Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel and Bill Gates have poured substantial amounts of money into the idea.
However, while the emergent crop of startups like Helion has repeatedly claimed that fusion energy is right around the corner, we have yet to see any concrete results.
Of course, if Altman's rosy vision of the future of energy production were to turn into a reality, we'd have a considerably greener way to power these AI models.
According to an October paper published in the journal Joule, adding generative AI to Google Search alone balloons its energy uses by more than tenfold.
"Let’s not make a new model to improve only its accuracy and speed," University of Florence assistant professor Roberto Verdecchia told the New York Times.
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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?