OpenAI CEO Altman says at Davos future AI depends on energy breakthrough

kinther@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 36 points –
reuters.com
15

So the silver lining to no energy breakthrough soon is they'll eventually have to give up on this AI shit because they can't make it run profitably.

You give them too much fucking credit. The rich are an entire class of people who don't know how to take "No" for an answer, they'll just burn every last drop of fossil fuel in pursuit of... something? and then say "oopsie doodles" when it's all gone and they still haven't gotten fusion off the ground.

But they're not profiting. Eventually they'll have to stop throwing away their money speculatively.

Going out on a limb here: Is AI really an efficiency and productivity increasing device if we have to *checks notes... have an energy breakthrough to be able to functionally use it?

It sounds to me like rich people are admitting it actually takes more resources to support AI than it does fucking workers who already exist and don't need a fucking energy breakthrough to function.

"There's no way to get there without a breakthrough," he said. "It motivates us to go invest more in fusion."

Seriously.

What we really need is another paradigm shift in AI. Current transformer models are great, but they're clearly not quite what we're looking for.

That said, an AI breakthrough on that scale is about as likely as an energy breakthrough, so I guess there isn't much practical difference, really.

If only AI was smart enough to bring us this breakthrough...

Everyone: Guys if we don't scale back our energy consumption we're literally gonna make the planet unlivable

Everyone: Guys if we don't reign in AI it might kill us all

Altman: I have an important request

Why is he letting us know OpenAI is eventually doomed?

Because it isn't.

To these kind of people, pursuing their own ideas is so much more important than feeding all humans on the planet, just for example.

Altman said he wished the world would embrace nuclear fission as an energy source as well.

"Ugh, everyone should just like accept fission so I can have my own nuclear power plant"

He gets invited to these Illuminati meetings and says that? Anyone not living under a rock knows the whole world needs an energy breakthrough. Half them believe we need it to save the planet and the other half want it so they can build bigger things. When have we ever not needed an energy breakthrough?