Modern nuclear reactors are designed to fail safely, so Windows couldn’t actually create a Chernobyl. Everything wrong with nuclear in our world is with old-gen plants. It’s a technology that got ahead of itself by 50 years.
Yeah, there's very little information in the article on what type of reactor they plan to use, but I hope they're able to go with something like a molten salt reactor with a thorium fuel cycle.
Getting half a dozen of those built and in use would be exactly the kind of thing that tech billionaires are actually good for.
Fuck that. Take all the government grants and subsidies that would surely exist, and then use it for their own good/profit/power hoarding? No thanks.
Putting billionaires in control of our nuclear power infrastructure after "building" them with mostly taxpayer money, when it's all said and done, is an absolutely bone chilling thought. Terrifying.
I don’t know why you think government subsidies exist - so impoverished single moms can build power plants? No. They’re pork for billionaires by design, to get them off their asses and steer them into directions we want to go. Like venture capital, they are also high risk. Our federal budget can support some level of this and it’s frankly needed to drive change in new or stalled industries where the motive for immediate profit isn’t strong enough to overcome the cold start problem. If your hatred of billionaires keeps you from making smart energy choices to address climate change, then your priorities are wrong.
The picture they show is from terrapower, the company Bill Gates funded, which is a thorium reactor. Thorium liquid salt reactors are still difficult because of the metallurgy. I believe they were supposed to fit the small modular concept though.
Like Microsoft uses Windows for anything that matters since they got rid of Balmer.
But... Developers!... /s
A lot of them do IIRC, windows 98 is popping into my mind as an instance I've read of
Windows NT or 2000. Not 98.
Ah yes you're correct, Windows 98 is (was?) the British nuclear submarines
Now THAT is wild as hell.
Could be worse, could be running MacOS. Surely nothing bad can happen while the entire system freezes for no reason for 15 minutes or more without any possible input from the user. It will always fix it self... (hopefully before the reactor achieves a run away meltdown chain.)
Better than coal or oil, it might even result in more R&D into reactor designs.
There’s no shortage of modern reactor designs. We have amazing stuff designed and even prototyped and proven - low waste, safely-failing reactors that basically can’t melt down. All we really lack is funding and regulatory clearance to build more.
Cortana, can you design a nuclear reactor to train you better?
Searching “Design a nuclear reactor to train you better” on Bing…
I thought this crazy energy consumption shit would cool off a bit after assholes stopped bitcoin mining.
Glad AI stepped up so we can generate bad art and prose while buttfucking the planet
Ok, hear me out: crypto, based on "proof of training an AI"
If it takes so much power, it must be secure, and this way it wouldn't be "totally wasted"...
Proof is a Turing test?
Nvidia Turing card test
I'm not sure if you're serious, but just in case: that wouldn't work, mining is really just verifying transactions. So if you're not doing that, you may earn crypto by "mining", but you can't spend it because no-one is verifying your transactions.
mining is really just verifying transactions
Not correct.
Mining is a "proof of work", in the case of Bitcoin it's competing to be the first to find a hash that meets certain parameters (difficulty), for a block referencing the previous top one. Whether the new block has transactions in it or not, you get the same reward for being the first one to find and broadcast it.
Verifying is done by every node in the P2P network, both when deciding whether to relay candidate transactions, and when checking whether a new block's hash meets the mining requirements.
The Bitcoin blockchain has plenty of valid blocks with no transactions in them (part of a speculative mining strategy used by some to get the block reward faster than others).
The whole scheme works the same with any other kind of "proof of work", as long as the nodes relaying the new block can check whether the work happened or not (there are many ways in which that could be accomplished for AI training, the easiest of them by publishing the new model and having nodes check whether it meets some quality parameters).
I mean, yeah. I knew most of that, but I just wanted to keep it short and simple.
I don't really understand how it would work with AI training. If your computers are working on training AI instead of finding blocks, I don't see how you can support transactions. Just sounds like distributed computing with rewards to me, where you might be able to cash out at some central portal or smth, but you can't send other people that money directly (at least not over a blockchain, but would be possible vis that portal maybe, although, again, that wouldn't be a blockchain).
The tricky bit is finding a problem that is hard to solve but easy to verify. I'm not sure AI tasks fall into that category.
The transaction verification is separate to the work.
The tricky bit is finding a problem that is hard to solve but easy to verify. I'm not sure AI tasks fall into that category.
They actually do. Training an AI involves changing some values in the model in an attempt for it to better fit an optimization function. It takes many tries to find a set of values that perform better, but a single try to confirm it does.
Both sides require much more computing power than for a single hash, but the difficulty imbalance is still there, and verifiers could change "how much better fit" the next model needs to be, just like they do by changing difficulty requirements right now.
True. The next iteration doesn't need to be optimal, just an improvement in the loss function.
And in the end, the planet will be gone with or without AI. The sun will consume it at some point.
Cryptocoins, blockchain, NFTs, AI craze. It's all the same people who think that the solution to the problems that capitalism has created is technology.
Nuclear power still requires huge front costs (goal of SMR is to reduce that, but first generations will not solve it), so it could be better to use them for every day life needs rather than a prospective commercial venture.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Weird thing is, I'd trust them to not abandon the reactor during a budget shutdown...
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.
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.
You just need to find a geologically safe place to put it and you need to make sure everyone involved follows safety protocols to the letter. And you can't have anyone cutting corners to save money. You need to spare no expense when it comes to safety.
The only issue is that people don't stay strict with keeping everything safe sometimes. People are terrified of it because when something goes wrong, everyone can see the very gruesome results very quickly
But I don't think microsoft or any company should be making an AI at the rate they are if it's going to take as much resources as it seems.
No, it isnt.
Safety isnt what makes nuclear expensive. You actually got rawdogged by Nuclear fanatics.
Damn. Sucks to still see Natural Gas as the cheapest.
I think that modern nuclear designs have a place in decarbonization but I don't think it is cheaper and we have a lot of hurdles still.
Wind power at shores is generally cheapest
Capital costs is incomplete, you need to look at lifetime costs versus lifetime production to get a more useful average - Levelized cost of energy (LCOE)
The human body produces a lot of electrical impulses. What if they just took all their workers and put them in some type of "work pod" and harnessed the energy to run the large scale AI?
They might get bored though. Maybe hook them up to some kind of virtual reality world.
Yes, and they could just live in the virtual reality so they never have to stop providing power. It'd be perfect
Imagine spending chunks of time in there hooked up to a device set to lose weight. Essentially just setting your intake to -300 calories a day and spending a month in there.
Essentially just setting your intake to -300 calories a day and spending a month in there.
It's called meth.
I mean you could have the AI make interesting scenarios for them!
It would cost more energy to feed them then they would produce. /s
That's just energy conversion. Loss is expected.
This is what happens when you don't teach your kids the Laws of Thermodynamics in school...
The reason is ultimately irrelevant, but I welcome more nuclear energy.
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.
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).
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.
Plus imagine how expensive uranium will get once we start relying on nuclear. It'll be the new oil.
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.
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...
This seems kind of ideal though, computers provide a near constant load (relatively speaking) that combines very well with nuclear energy.
Perhaps we should be asking why we haven’t already been doing this for the past decade?
Because it costs less money to push the cost to for taxpayers to subsidize it than owning it
Correction
Those data centers are paying for their electrical usage. Economies of scale just make it more favorable for them over building their own power generation (solar/wind excluded).
Tell me more about how capitalists efficiently allocate resources.
This may actually be one of those things where it turns out to be worth it (for them anyway), if they can get some major technological advancements out of it.
There are so many other things in the world that are way more wasteful and way more pointless.
Allocative efficiency in economics just means that you can't make someone better off without making someone else worse off.
An efficient allocation isn't necessarily equitable.
And the first welfare theorem of economics only claims that the market will produce an allocatively efficient result if its complete, in perfect competition, and everyone has complete information. Which has the obvious problems of those preconditions not matching reality.
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
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
Nuclear produces the least emissions over it's life cycle and has a safety rating that flip flops with solar depending on how they want to classify accidents in construction and preparation.
If you want a sustainable, clean and reliable future, your power grid needs Wind, Solar and Nuclear. There is absolutely no reason to exclude Nuclear Power from any green energy plan.
that's what the operating system running the reactor would say
At least we hope that it will do that when it can’t handle the reactor - it puts reactor to sleep.
Imagine if it ends up requiring the achieving of ignition for Microsoft to launch a version of clippy that is able to reliably comprehend English grammar enough to make writing recommendations.
Fuck you, ditch it like a Zune and make some more video games.
Or make some more Zunes.
More Zunes, please. My Zune 30 has dead pixels and the battery is on its way out.
Damn thing lasted longer than my marriage and an 8 year relationship after that.
The power consumption is factored into the cost of AI. It's still profitable after that, or they wouldn't be doing it.
It's the biggest buzzword right now, it doesn't matter if it's profitable. I doubt most uses are directly profitable right now. It'd more of a FOMO situation - if we don't use AI, we're OBSOLETE! AHHH!
If it turns out not to be profitable in the long run then people will stop.
Should we never even experiment?
That's basically exactly my point. Seems we agree lol. I was just poking fun at the fact that it feels like just about every large tech company is doing it, just like when the metaverse was all the rage... Or crypto, or...
Or Windows Phones 📱
Windows phones were nice, except Microsoft made them even more locked-down than iPhones...
If they handle their nuclear reactor like they handle their cloud infrastructure security, we’re doomed.
I don't get why a train AI would need so much power, how hard is it to drive a train?
Will the nuclear reactors be on the train with the AI, or will it be some sort of wired transfer?
I assume they can power the train AI by pantograph or third rail - no reason to have nuclear powered trains, this isn't Factorio.
If your train has a bad conductor, it will require more power.
Yeah tell me about it, I only have bad conductors.
This is how we end up with Blaine the Mono
Not sure if you're making fun or actually not understanding? To clarify, they need the power for training AI models. No trains are involved, neither passenger nor cargo – though atom powered trains sounds interesting as well!
Thank you, you are very kind. It was meant as a joke.
AI's going to kill us off by doing what we do better than us. Consuming resources and producing waste. And we're already pretty good at it.
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.
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.
VSCode is cool, no ?
I will never forgive them for telling Microsoft Games to stop developing Freelancer 2.
Microsoft has invested in several fusion projects too.
I guess the nuclear power people are gonna become Microsoft fans... powered by nuclear power.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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:
I'm not one to be all doom and gloom about ai, but giving one its own small nuclear reactor, presumably one that's in close proximity to it and separate from the local power grid... that's obviously going to have substantial security measures around it... and be that much more difficult to cut off if need be....
I mean, it's starting to sound a lot like an unbelievable plot hole in a bad sci fi movie isn't it?
That's a nice sci-fi thought, but also not really how it works irl.
Physical proximity is not really a factor here.
There's a lot more going on at all levels that makes this absurd at best. Movies are not a good representation of reality, they can't be if they are meant to be entertaining.
Why are you saying this as if the AI would have control over the reactor.
It's unlikely they'd even be in the same building, or even the same campus. We have these crazy things called "wires" that let us transmit a lot of power over distances, so your small nuclear reactor can be remote, safe and secure and your AI lab can just be on your main campus.
They should call it WOPR for no reason whatsoever.
Anyone fancy a nice game of chess?
Ironic you compare it to a bad sci fi movie and that's exactly where your knowledge is coming from.
You do konw, that it is IMPOSSIBLE for a nuclear reactor to explode in a nuclear fission explosion, aka become a nuclear bomb. Reaching critical mass isn't possible. Nuclear reactors can catch on fire, if built using graphite, that isn't done anymore, or have a steam explosion. but that's it.
They can also get hot enough to melt the metallic components (including the fuel itself) if the reaction isn't properly regulated (hence, "meltdown"), but you're correct that that's still not a fission explosion.
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.
That’s pretty cool. I would have guessed it would be cheaper to use wind energy.
Cheaper but unreliable.
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.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Training large language models is an incredibly power-intensive process that has an immense carbon footprint.
Now, The Verge reports, Microsoft is betting so big on AI that its pushing forward with a plan to power them using nuclear reactors.
Yes, you read that right; a recent job listing suggests the company is planning to grow its energy infrastructure with the use of small modular reactors (SMR.)
But before Microsoft can start relying on nuclear power to train its AIs, it'll have plenty of other hurdles to overcome.
Then, it'll have to figure out how to get its hands on a highly enriched uranium fuel that these small reactors typically require, as The Verge points out.
Nevertheless, the company signed a power purchase agreement with Helion, a fusion startup founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman earlier this year, with the hopes of buying electricity from it as soon as 2028.
The original article contains 346 words, the summary contains 147 words. Saved 58%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
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.
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.
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.
The thought of a nuclear reactor running on Windows is terrifying.
They’re going to build it in 2026 but it’ll still somehow be running on XP.
“What operating system is that running?”
“Uh… vista.”
“We’re all going to die!”
If they make it Windows ME then we ARE ALL DEAD!
Have you tried turning it off and back on again?
Even Microsoft does not trust Windows on Azure 🤣
They'll probably not use Windows, instead opting for an OS that is proven to work with already running reactors, like QNX
They should run Arch, btw
Modern nuclear reactors are designed to fail safely, so Windows couldn’t actually create a Chernobyl. Everything wrong with nuclear in our world is with old-gen plants. It’s a technology that got ahead of itself by 50 years.
Yeah, there's very little information in the article on what type of reactor they plan to use, but I hope they're able to go with something like a molten salt reactor with a thorium fuel cycle.
Getting half a dozen of those built and in use would be exactly the kind of thing that tech billionaires are actually good for.
Fuck that. Take all the government grants and subsidies that would surely exist, and then use it for their own good/profit/power hoarding? No thanks.
Putting billionaires in control of our nuclear power infrastructure after "building" them with mostly taxpayer money, when it's all said and done, is an absolutely bone chilling thought. Terrifying.
I don’t know why you think government subsidies exist - so impoverished single moms can build power plants? No. They’re pork for billionaires by design, to get them off their asses and steer them into directions we want to go. Like venture capital, they are also high risk. Our federal budget can support some level of this and it’s frankly needed to drive change in new or stalled industries where the motive for immediate profit isn’t strong enough to overcome the cold start problem. If your hatred of billionaires keeps you from making smart energy choices to address climate change, then your priorities are wrong.
The picture they show is from terrapower, the company Bill Gates funded, which is a thorium reactor. Thorium liquid salt reactors are still difficult because of the metallurgy. I believe they were supposed to fit the small modular concept though.
Like Microsoft uses Windows for anything that matters since they got rid of Balmer.
But... Developers!... /s
A lot of them do IIRC, windows 98 is popping into my mind as an instance I've read of
Windows NT or 2000. Not 98.
Ah yes you're correct, Windows 98 is (was?) the British nuclear submarines
Now THAT is wild as hell.
Could be worse, could be running MacOS. Surely nothing bad can happen while the entire system freezes for no reason for 15 minutes or more without any possible input from the user. It will always fix it self... (hopefully before the reactor achieves a run away meltdown chain.)
A corporation running a nuclear reactor to train AIs might just be the most cyberpunk news headline I've ever seen.
This gave me an idea for some level design I might want to use in a video game.
I wanna play your game lol
Better than coal or oil, it might even result in more R&D into reactor designs.
There’s no shortage of modern reactor designs. We have amazing stuff designed and even prototyped and proven - low waste, safely-failing reactors that basically can’t melt down. All we really lack is funding and regulatory clearance to build more.
Cortana, can you design a nuclear reactor to train you better?
Searching “Design a nuclear reactor to train you better” on Bing…
Yes daddy
I thought this crazy energy consumption shit would cool off a bit after assholes stopped bitcoin mining.
Glad AI stepped up so we can generate bad art and prose while buttfucking the planet
Ok, hear me out: crypto, based on "proof of training an AI"
If it takes so much power, it must be secure, and this way it wouldn't be "totally wasted"...
Proof is a Turing test?
Nvidia Turing card test
I'm not sure if you're serious, but just in case: that wouldn't work, mining is really just verifying transactions. So if you're not doing that, you may earn crypto by "mining", but you can't spend it because no-one is verifying your transactions.
Not correct.
Mining is a "proof of work", in the case of Bitcoin it's competing to be the first to find a hash that meets certain parameters (difficulty), for a block referencing the previous top one. Whether the new block has transactions in it or not, you get the same reward for being the first one to find and broadcast it.
Verifying is done by every node in the P2P network, both when deciding whether to relay candidate transactions, and when checking whether a new block's hash meets the mining requirements.
The Bitcoin blockchain has plenty of valid blocks with no transactions in them (part of a speculative mining strategy used by some to get the block reward faster than others).
The whole scheme works the same with any other kind of "proof of work", as long as the nodes relaying the new block can check whether the work happened or not (there are many ways in which that could be accomplished for AI training, the easiest of them by publishing the new model and having nodes check whether it meets some quality parameters).
I mean, yeah. I knew most of that, but I just wanted to keep it short and simple.
I don't really understand how it would work with AI training. If your computers are working on training AI instead of finding blocks, I don't see how you can support transactions. Just sounds like distributed computing with rewards to me, where you might be able to cash out at some central portal or smth, but you can't send other people that money directly (at least not over a blockchain, but would be possible vis that portal maybe, although, again, that wouldn't be a blockchain).
Proof of work need not be useless. E.g. https://primecoin.io/
The tricky bit is finding a problem that is hard to solve but easy to verify. I'm not sure AI tasks fall into that category.
The transaction verification is separate to the work.
They actually do. Training an AI involves changing some values in the model in an attempt for it to better fit an optimization function. It takes many tries to find a set of values that perform better, but a single try to confirm it does.
Both sides require much more computing power than for a single hash, but the difficulty imbalance is still there, and verifiers could change "how much better fit" the next model needs to be, just like they do by changing difficulty requirements right now.
True. The next iteration doesn't need to be optimal, just an improvement in the loss function.
Not sure how they would decide when to stop.
Huh, neat. Thanks for the info!
The planet will be alright. It will be lush green in a few million years when humans no longer exist.
The current ecosystem, though.... yeah. Buttfucked.
Humans will exist. We will live in the sea and we will have flippers. Our brains will be smaller, but we will eat lots of fish.
Bold of you to assume we'll still have fish after global warming, oil spills and micro plastics do their thing.
In that case, we're all amoebas.
That doesn't sound crass enough to grasp the full extend of the development. AI will take all of the energy. E v e r y t h I n g.
There won't be a planet once there is a Dyson sphere. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere
I'll be dead by then.
And in the end, the planet will be gone with or without AI. The sun will consume it at some point.
Cryptocoins, blockchain, NFTs, AI craze. It's all the same people who think that the solution to the problems that capitalism has created is technology.
The GPU manufacturers are having the time of their lives.
So we finally get thorium power, but its only used to make celebrity porn for incels.
Hey, whatever keeps them out of Walmart parking lots at 1am.
Like there's somewhere better to buy celebrity porn at 1am. Psh. I'll believe it when I see it.
Nice!
Honestly getting Thorium power AND never having Incels leave their home or interact with society again sounds like a win-win.
Maybe we should focus on the collapsing ecosystem then instead of training AI datasets.
Nuclear power means they can do both.
Hear me out:
What if we used that nuclear power only to fix the environment?
Ok, find someone willing to pay for one for that purpose.
Microsoft isn't 'we'
Nuclear power still requires huge front costs (goal of SMR is to reduce that, but first generations will not solve it), so it could be better to use them for every day life needs rather than a prospective commercial venture.
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.
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.
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.
How much nuclear waste are we talking about? Every time I've seen any actual quantity mentioned, it's tiny.
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.
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.
Weird thing is, I'd trust them to not abandon the reactor during a budget shutdown...
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.
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.
They'll ship it to India/Thailand
Nuclear power is actually way cheaper.
You just need to find a geologically safe place to put it and you need to make sure everyone involved follows safety protocols to the letter. And you can't have anyone cutting corners to save money. You need to spare no expense when it comes to safety.
The only issue is that people don't stay strict with keeping everything safe sometimes. People are terrified of it because when something goes wrong, everyone can see the very gruesome results very quickly
But I don't think microsoft or any company should be making an AI at the rate they are if it's going to take as much resources as it seems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#Capital_costs
No, it isnt.
Safety isnt what makes nuclear expensive. You actually got rawdogged by Nuclear fanatics.
Damn. Sucks to still see Natural Gas as the cheapest.
I think that modern nuclear designs have a place in decarbonization but I don't think it is cheaper and we have a lot of hurdles still.
Wind power at shores is generally cheapest
Capital costs is incomplete, you need to look at lifetime costs versus lifetime production to get a more useful average - Levelized cost of energy (LCOE)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity
https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/2023-levelized-cost-of-energyplus/
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/levelized-cost-of-energy
https://www.iea.org/reports/projected-costs-of-generating-electricity-2020
Wikipedia is owned by someone who's married to an intelligence agency member.
I see absolutely no relevance here
Mmkay
Yea this entire clickbait can be summarized as "company looks to spend less on high capacity power"
Rare lemming reasonable take
And you just need to find good non science fiction way to deal with nuclear waste.
And some ethical ways of aquiring uranium.
With all that calculated in, I am certain how much cheaper it is.
The human body produces a lot of electrical impulses. What if they just took all their workers and put them in some type of "work pod" and harnessed the energy to run the large scale AI?
They might get bored though. Maybe hook them up to some kind of virtual reality world.
Yes, and they could just live in the virtual reality so they never have to stop providing power. It'd be perfect
Imagine spending chunks of time in there hooked up to a device set to lose weight. Essentially just setting your intake to -300 calories a day and spending a month in there.
It's called meth.
I mean you could have the AI make interesting scenarios for them!
It would cost more energy to feed them then they would produce. /s
That's just energy conversion. Loss is expected.
This is what happens when you don't teach your kids the Laws of Thermodynamics in school...
The reason is ultimately irrelevant, but I welcome more nuclear energy.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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...
This seems kind of ideal though, computers provide a near constant load (relatively speaking) that combines very well with nuclear energy.
Perhaps we should be asking why we haven’t already been doing this for the past decade?
Because it costs less money
to push the cost tofor taxpayers to subsidize it than owning itCorrection
Those data centers are paying for their electrical usage. Economies of scale just make it more favorable for them over building their own power generation (solar/wind excluded).
Tell me you know nothing about data centers without telling me.
Tell me more about how capitalists efficiently allocate resources.
This may actually be one of those things where it turns out to be worth it (for them anyway), if they can get some major technological advancements out of it.
There are so many other things in the world that are way more wasteful and way more pointless.
Allocative efficiency in economics just means that you can't make someone better off without making someone else worse off.
An efficient allocation isn't necessarily equitable.
And the first welfare theorem of economics only claims that the market will produce an allocatively efficient result if its complete, in perfect competition, and everyone has complete information. Which has the obvious problems of those preconditions not matching reality.
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
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
Windows 13 isn't that far away.
!Remindthem 6 years
Hi bing. How do I stop a nuclear reactor from going critical?
For those correcting my error It was just a joke. The only things I know about nuclear power I learned from the simpsons and Kyle hill
you turn it off.
"critical" is the normal operating state of reactor when it's working. what you want to avoid is supercriticality, which means that power is rising. if it's delayed supercritical but prompt subcritical, power rises and may or may not stop on its own at some point. when it's prompt supercritical, you don't even have time to ask https://www.nuclear-power.com/nuclear-power/reactor-physics/nuclear-fission-chain-reaction/reactor-criticality/
Modern reactor design also pretty much makes runaway reactions nearly impossible, as in, you have to actually try to fuck it up.
Even Fukushima didn't have a runaway reaction, it just lost coolant.
Don't turn it on? Critical means a reaction that is exactly self sustaining, i.e. a constant power level.
Buy MS office subscription.
LLM seemed really impressive at first, but it made it to “this year’s NFTs” in record time.
Fusion won’t be ready by then
Energy should be public
energy, water, food and housing should not be used for profit. Everything else is fair game.
Nah, not everything else. You can add healthcare to the list.
The irony is very funny considering your username :)
Agreed! Idk why that didn't come to mind.
And healthcare. You know, all the stuff to keep us alive.
But there's so much profit to be made in things required to survive.
There isn't a price point at which I'll choose to quit using food and water.
Just fill the Country with Solar, Wind and Water... won't take 10 years and will be cheaper too.
Hydropower is about as bad for most ecosystems as burning fossil fuels. And its definitely not something that can be done quick or cheaply.
Whats the source on it being about as bad?
It releases methane, yes.
We don't have to do hydro. Wind and the Sun are already plenty enough.
UNs IPCC Reports https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/03/Chapter-5-Hydropower-1.pdf See fig 5.15. The outliers are the concern (and yes, it's pretty much methane)
Edit: I reread the parent comment, the above won't address what you asked for, but is interesting nonetheless so I'll leave it
Thank you for the paper.
This does indeed clarify exact numbers that i didnt have.
https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
Nuclear produces the least emissions over it's life cycle and has a safety rating that flip flops with solar depending on how they want to classify accidents in construction and preparation.
If you want a sustainable, clean and reliable future, your power grid needs Wind, Solar and Nuclear. There is absolutely no reason to exclude Nuclear Power from any green energy plan.
And a dam failure isn't that much better than a nuclear accident, and far more common and less regulated
Nonsense, Microsoft will just put lots of PMs and Scrum masters on the task and they'll have a working reactor in 1 year max.
/s, just in case any PMs are reading this and think it's totally reasonable
Estimate is 10 years? OK let's 10x the workforce and get it done in 1
Also, little known fact, 9 women can deliver one single baby in 1 month from conception!
Can't argue with those numbers.
Power density matters. And nuclear is pretty fucking dense haha
.. for some applications. Not most tho. Really like 5. Everything else should be solar/wind/hydro
... And cause a lot of pollution and ecological stress, unless you funnel a LARGE amount of money and time into it.
I guess the rich don’t have an energy crisis.
Burning 3 continents worth of coal to steal artwork at maximum efficiency.
Do nuclear reactors use coal?
Let's not bring that X/Twitter shit to Lemmy.
Coal? Did you miss the nuclear part?
I can't handle this . i'm going to sleep.
that's what the operating system running the reactor would say
At least we hope that it will do that when it can’t handle the reactor - it puts reactor to sleep.
Imagine if it ends up requiring the achieving of ignition for Microsoft to launch a version of clippy that is able to reliably comprehend English grammar enough to make writing recommendations.
There is nothing wrong with nuclear power
Thats what France said.
AI needs that's much power?
Fuck you, ditch it like a Zune and make some more video games.
Or make some more Zunes.
More Zunes, please. My Zune 30 has dead pixels and the battery is on its way out.
Damn thing lasted longer than my marriage and an 8 year relationship after that.
The power consumption is factored into the cost of AI. It's still profitable after that, or they wouldn't be doing it.
It's the biggest buzzword right now, it doesn't matter if it's profitable. I doubt most uses are directly profitable right now. It'd more of a FOMO situation - if we don't use AI, we're OBSOLETE! AHHH!
If it turns out not to be profitable in the long run then people will stop.
Should we never even experiment?
That's basically exactly my point. Seems we agree lol. I was just poking fun at the fact that it feels like just about every large tech company is doing it, just like when the metaverse was all the rage... Or crypto, or...
Or Windows Phones 📱
Windows phones were nice, except Microsoft made them even more locked-down than iPhones...
If they handle their nuclear reactor like they handle their cloud infrastructure security, we’re doomed.
I don't get why a train AI would need so much power, how hard is it to drive a train?
Will the nuclear reactors be on the train with the AI, or will it be some sort of wired transfer?
I assume they can power the train AI by pantograph or third rail - no reason to have nuclear powered trains, this isn't Factorio.
If your train has a bad conductor, it will require more power.
Yeah tell me about it, I only have bad conductors.
This is how we end up with Blaine the Mono
Not sure if you're making fun or actually not understanding? To clarify, they need the power for training AI models. No trains are involved, neither passenger nor cargo – though atom powered trains sounds interesting as well!
Thank you, you are very kind. It was meant as a joke.
AI's going to kill us off by doing what we do better than us. Consuming resources and producing waste. And we're already pretty good at it.
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.
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.
VSCode is cool, no ?
I will never forgive them for telling Microsoft Games to stop developing Freelancer 2.
Microsoft has invested in several fusion projects too.
I guess the nuclear power people are gonna become Microsoft fans... powered by nuclear power.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
I'm not one to be all doom and gloom about ai, but giving one its own small nuclear reactor, presumably one that's in close proximity to it and separate from the local power grid... that's obviously going to have substantial security measures around it... and be that much more difficult to cut off if need be....
I mean, it's starting to sound a lot like an unbelievable plot hole in a bad sci fi movie isn't it?
That's.... Not how things work. Creative, but no.
That's a nice sci-fi thought, but also not really how it works irl.
Physical proximity is not really a factor here.
There's a lot more going on at all levels that makes this absurd at best. Movies are not a good representation of reality, they can't be if they are meant to be entertaining.
Why are you saying this as if the AI would have control over the reactor.
It's unlikely they'd even be in the same building, or even the same campus. We have these crazy things called "wires" that let us transmit a lot of power over distances, so your small nuclear reactor can be remote, safe and secure and your AI lab can just be on your main campus.
They should call it WOPR for no reason whatsoever.
Anyone fancy a nice game of chess?
Ironic you compare it to a bad sci fi movie and that's exactly where your knowledge is coming from.
You do konw, that it is IMPOSSIBLE for a nuclear reactor to explode in a nuclear fission explosion, aka become a nuclear bomb. Reaching critical mass isn't possible. Nuclear reactors can catch on fire, if built using graphite, that isn't done anymore, or have a steam explosion. but that's it.
They can also get hot enough to melt the metallic components (including the fuel itself) if the reaction isn't properly regulated (hence, "meltdown"), but you're correct that that's still not a fission explosion.
people need lots of energy for life as well, now what??
Its going to be all for nothing at the end of the day.
Elaborate?
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.
That’s pretty cool. I would have guessed it would be cheaper to use wind energy.
Cheaper but unreliable.
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.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Training large language models is an incredibly power-intensive process that has an immense carbon footprint.
Now, The Verge reports, Microsoft is betting so big on AI that its pushing forward with a plan to power them using nuclear reactors.
Yes, you read that right; a recent job listing suggests the company is planning to grow its energy infrastructure with the use of small modular reactors (SMR.)
But before Microsoft can start relying on nuclear power to train its AIs, it'll have plenty of other hurdles to overcome.
Then, it'll have to figure out how to get its hands on a highly enriched uranium fuel that these small reactors typically require, as The Verge points out.
Nevertheless, the company signed a power purchase agreement with Helion, a fusion startup founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman earlier this year, with the hopes of buying electricity from it as soon as 2028.
The original article contains 346 words, the summary contains 147 words. Saved 58%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
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.
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.
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.
That makes zero sense
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.