Sam Altman Says AI Using Too Much Energy, Will Require Breakthrough Energy Source

stopthatgirl7@kbin.social to Technology@lemmy.world – 388 points – Sam Altman Says AI Using Too Much Energy, Will Require Breakthrough Energy Source
futurism.com

"There's no way to get there without a breakthrough," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said, arguing that AI will soon need even more energy.

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Skinner Out Of Touch Meme: Are the AI using toouch energy? Nah, must be the weak energy sources.

Optimizing power consumption? Why?!

In fairness the computing world has seen unfathomable efficiency gains that are being pushed further with the sudden adoption of arm. We are doing our damnedest to make computers faster and more efficient, and we're doing a really good job of it, but energy production hasn't seen nearly those gains in the same amount of time. With the sudden widespread adoption of AI, a very power hungry tool (because it's basically emulating a brain in a computer), it has caused a sudden spike in energy needed for computers that are already getting more efficient as fast as we can. Meanwhile energy production isn't keeping up at the same rate of innovation.

The problem there is the paradox of efficiency, making something more efficient ends up using more of it not less as the increase in use stimulated by the greater efficiency outweighs the reduced input used.

It's not so much the hardware as it is the software and utilisation, and by software I don't necessarily mean any specific algorithm, because I know they give much thought to optimisation strategies when it comes to implementation and design of machine learning architectures. What I mean by software is the full stack considered as a whole, and by utilisation I mean the way services advertise and make use of ill-suited architectures.

The full stack consists of general purpose computing devices with an unreasonable number of layers of abstraction between the hardware and the languages used in implementations of machine learning. A lot of this stuff is written in Python! While algorithmic complexity is naturally a major factor, how it is compiled and executed matters a lot, too.

Once AI implementations stabilise, the theoretically most energy efficient way to run it would be on custom hardware made to only run that code, and that code would be written in the lowest possible level of abstraction. The closer we get to the metal (or the closer the metal gets to our program), the more efficient we can make it go. I don't think we take bespoke hardware seriously enough; we're stuck in this mindset of everything being general-purpose.

As for utilisation: LLMs are not fit or even capable of dealing with logical problems or anything involving reasoning based on knowledge; they can't even reliably regurgitate knowledge. Yet, as far as I can tell, this constitutes a significant portion of its current use.

If the usage of LLMs was reserved for solving linguistic problems, then we wouldn't be wasting so much energy generating text and expecting it to contain wisdom. A language model should serve as a surface layer -- an interface -- on top of bespoke tools, including other domain-specific types of models. I know we're seeing this idea being iterated on, but I don't see this being pushed nearly enough.[^1]

When it comes to image generation models, I think it's wrong to focus on generating derivative art/remixes of existing works instead of on tools to help artists express themselves. All these image generation sites we have now consume so much power just so that artistically wanting people can generate 20 versions (give or take an order of magnitude) of the same generic thing. I would like to see AI technology made specifically for integration into professional workflows and tools, enabling creative people to enhance and iterate on their work through specific instructions.[^2] The AI we have now are made for people who can't tell (or don't care about) the difference between remixing and creating and just want to tell the computer to make something nice so they can use it to sell their products.

The end result in all these cases is that fewer people can live off of being creative and/or knowledgeable while energy consumption spikes as computers generate shitty substitutes. After all, capitalism is all about efficient allocation of resources. Just so happens that quality (of life; art; anything) is inefficient and exploiting the planet is cheap.

[^1]: For example, why does OpenAI gate external tool integration behind a payment plan while offering simple text generation for free? That just encourages people to rely on text generation for all kinds of tasks it's not suitable for. Other examples include companies offering AI "assistants" or even AI "teachers"(!), all of which are incapable of even remembering the topic being discussed 2 minutes into a conversation. [^2]: I get incredibly frustrated when I try to use image generation tools because I go into it with a vision, but since the models are incapable of creating anything new based on actual concepts I only ever end up with something incredibly artistically compromised and derivative. I can generate hundreds of images based on various contortions of the same prompt, reference image, masking, etc and still not get what I want. THAT is inefficient use of resources, and it's all because the tools are just not made to help me do art.

It's emulating a ridiculously simplified brain. Real brains have orders of magnitude more neurons, but beyond that they already have completely asynchronous evaluation of those neurons, as well as much more complicated connecting structure, as well as multiple methods of communicating with other neurons, some of which are incredibly subtle and hard to detect.

To really take AI to the next level I think you'd need a completely bespoke processor that can replicate those attributes in hardware, but it would be a very expensive gamble because you'd have no idea if it would work until you built it.

This dude al is the new florida man, wonder if it's the same al from married with children

Some of the smartest people on the planet are working to make this profitable. It's fucking hard.

You are dense and haven't taking even a look at simple shit like hugging face. Power consumption is about the biggest topic you find with anyone in the know.

Some of the smartest people on the planet are working to make this profitable. It's fucking hard.

[Take a look at] hugging face. Power consumption is about the biggest topic you find with anyone in the know.

^ fair comment

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've seen that film

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

We use all of our brain. Well, some of us try to anyway.

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…

🤔

That would require a revolutionary discovery in material science and hardware.

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 overfitted evolved intelligence. Thanks Darwin we did it again.

It'd be way easier to just grow brains instead

We invented computers to do things human brains either couldn't do, or couldn't do fast enough.

So AI can't exist without stealing people's content and it can't exist without using too much energy. Why does it exist then?

Because the shareholders need more growth. They might create Ultron along the way, but think of the profits, man!

There's no way these chatbots are capable of evolving into Ultron. That's like saying a toaster is capable of nuclear fusion.

Thats if you set the toaster to anything above 3

It’s the further research being done on top of the breakthrough tech enabling the chat bots applications people are worried about. It’s basically big tech’s mission now to build Ultron, and they aren’t slowing down.

What research? These bots aren't that complicated beyond an optimisation algorithm. Regardless of the tasks you give it, it can't evolve beyond what it is.

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I think we've got a bit before we have to worry about another major jump in AI and way longer for an Ultron. The ones we have now are effectively parsers for google or other existing data. I personally still don't see how we feel like we can get away with calling that AI.

Any AI that actually creates something 'new' that I've seen still requires a tremendous amount of oversight, tweaking and guidance to produce useful results. To me, they still feel like very fancy search engines.

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So AI can't exist without stealing people's content

Using the word “steal” in a way that implies misconduct here is “You wouldn’t download a car” level reasoning. It’s not stealing to use the work of some other artist to inform your own work. If you copy it precisely then it’s plagiarism or infringement, but if you take the style of another artist and learn to use it yourself, that’s…exactly how art has advanced over the course of human history. “Great artists steal,” said Picasso famously.

Training your model on pirated copies, that’s shady. But training your model on purchased or freely available content that’s out there for anyone else to learn from? That’s…just how learning works.

Obviously there are differences, in that generative AI is not actually doing structured “thinking” about the creation of a work. That is, of course, the job of the human writing and tweaking the prompts. But training an AI to be able to write like someone else or paint like someone else isn’t theft unless the AI is, without HEAVY manipulation, spitting out copies that infringe on the intellectual property of the original author/artist/musician.

Generative AI, in its current form, is nothing more than a tool. And you can use any tool nefariously, but that doesn’t mean the tool is inherently nefarious. You can use Microsoft Word to copy Eat, Pray, Love but Elizabeth Gilbert shouldn’t sue Microsoft, she should sue you.

Edit: fixed a typo

The models get more efficient and smaller very fast if you look just a year back. I bet we’ll run some small LLMs locally on our phones (I don’t really believe in the other form factors yet) sooner as we believe. I’d say prior 2030.

I can already locally host a pretty decent ai chatbot on my old M1 Macbook (llama v2 7B) which writes at the same speed I can read, its probably already possible with the top of the line phones.

Lol, "old M1 laptop" 3 to 4 years is not old, damn!

(I have running macbookpro5,3 (mid 2009) on Arch, lol)

But nice to hear that M1 (an thus theoretically even the iPad, if you are not talking about M1 pro / M1 max) can already run llamma v2 7B.

Have you tried the mistralAI already, should be a bit more powerful and a bit more efficient iirc. And it is Apache 2.0 licensed.

https://mistral.ai/news/announcing-mistral-7b/

But nice to hear that M1 (a thus theoretically even the iPad, if you are not talking about M1 pro / M1 max) can already run llamma v2 7B.

An iPhone XR/XS can run Stable Diffusion, believe it or not.

3 to 4 years is not old

Huh, nice. I got the macbook air secondhand so I thought it was older. Thanks for the suggestion, I'll try mistralAI next, perhaps on my phone as a test.

Because it's a miracle technology. Both of those things are also engineering problems - ones that have been massively mitigated already. You can run models almost as good as gpt3.5 on a phone, and individuals are pushing the limits on how efficiently we can train every week

It's not just making a chatbot or a new tool for art - it's also protein folding, coming up with unexpected materials, and being another pair of eyes that will assist a person do anything.

They literally promise the fountain of youth, autonomous robots, better materials, better batteries, better everything. It's a path for our species to break our limits, and become more.

The downside is we don't know how to handle it. We're making a mess of it, but it's not like we could stop... The AI alignment problem is dwarfed by the corporation alignment problem

🙄 iTS nOt stEAliNg, iTS coPYiNg

By your definition everything is stealing content. Nearly everything in human history is derivative of others work.

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If only we could convert empty hype into energy.

Well we can, we had a "jumpstyle" wave going on in the Netherlands a couple of years ago. No clue if it ever got off the ground anywhere else seeing as it was a techno thing or something.

It's like crypto but sliiiighly better

It's so, so, so much better. GenAI is actually useful, crypto is gambling pretending to be a solution in search of a problem.

How about an efficiency breakthrough instead? Our brains just need a meal and can recognize a face without looking at billions of others first.

I mean, we can only do that because our system was trained for hundreds of thousands, millions of years into being able to recognise others of same species

Almost all of our training was done without requiring burning fossil fuels. So maybe ole Sammy can put the brakes on his shit until it’s as fuel efficient as a human brain.

Food production and transport is famously a zero emission industry.

We’ve been around for hundreds of thousands of years as homosapiens. Food production and transport emissions were practically 0% until the last 100 years. So, yes, that’s right.

While that is true, a lot of death and suffering was required for us to reach this point as a species. Machines don't need the wars and natural selection required to achieve the same feats, and don't have our same limitations.

They are nowhere NEAR achieving the same feats as humans.

Erm.

I recall a study about kids under a specific age that cannot get scared of looking at pictures of demons and other horror stuff because they don't know yet what your everyday default person looks like.

So I'd argue that even people need to get accustomed to a thing before they could recognise or have an opinion about anything.

We still need to look at quite a few. And the other billions have been pre-programmed by a couple of billion years of evolution.

"recognize a face"

Who's? Can the human brain just know what someone looks like without prior experience?

Your ability to do anything is based on decades of "data sets" that you're being constantly fed, it's no different than an AI they just get it all at once and we have to learn by individual experience.

Neurolink plus AI in 10 years is basically the matrix then.

Great right from coin miners to the "AI" fad. Tons of carbon shot into the sky and for what? A more unequal society on both counts.

Sure, we destroyed the planet, but we did it so we could produce valuable artwork like this:

Yeah, I'd say it was worth it. It also gave us this:

🎶🎵 Middle-age mutant ninja turtles,

Middle-age mutant ninja turtles,

Middle-age mutant ninja turtles,

Heros on the Advil!

Turtle Back pain! 🎵 🎶

I can’t decide if I want this to have been written by an AI or not.

I'm not an AI, thought of it a few days ago, and this seemed like a good opportunity to deploy it

At least AI has the potential to do something useful unlike coin mining. Although its not doing much currently so not to wild about it. Maybe real ai that could actually find new energy sources.

General artificial intelligence has the potential to be actually useful. Generative AI, like Chat GPT (Generative Pre-Trained Transformer) absolutely does not. It’s a glorified autocomplete.

Chat GPT (Generative Pre-Trained Transformer) absolutely does not.

I had to help my wife with an Excel VBA script. I know a few programming languages but I don't know vba. Hours of googling turned up no useable scripts that did what I needed. ChatGPT wrote a working VBA script in seconds.

Anyone who thinks it is a fancy auto complete hasn't used it.

It is a fancy auto complete, just an incredibly fancy auto complete. In the same way that a computer that can run VR games, simulate the evolution of solar systems let you access something close to the sum total of human knowledge over the internet is a very fancy pocket calculator.

I think it's better explained as a search engine that works at the word level of granularity. It lets you do a word level search of all written human knowledge which allows it to adapt to your specific prompt. It's the next step in searching knowledge based. First we had libraries, then document search, now it's word search. I think it'll be impactful on the same level as the creation of libraries and search engines.

I'd tried using it for python and it made up some fake library that does not exist to handle the complex task I was asking it do it. Utterly useless. The way it works is so complicated is simply has you fooled thinking it's more than a fancy auto complete, but it is literally exactly that. Just the "smartest" auto complete there is. Don't worry about it, at least you did not fall it love with it and then left your wife to be with ChatGPT, right?

it's a tool to be used like any other. If you are relying on it to produce working code with no effort on your part then yes it is likely useless. If you are using it to get you most of the way there its very useful. For example, I'm most comfortable writing python but have been doing a lot of c# recently, asking a code focused LLM questions like "how do you rename a column of a c# datatable" is so much quicker and more useful than trying to search through blogspam its not even funny.

As someone that works in IT and has seen the actual real world merit of LLMs, you guys clearly don't work in a white collar field or you'd realize that you sound like someone in the 90's claiming the internet is a fad.

Microsoft continues to integrate it, and on prem data and cloud engineers are hooking it up to company resources for everything from helping with data creep to handling low level repetitive tasks.

In the next ten years all bottom level data entry will be performed entirely by on premise AI models and the position of secretary will be a thing of the past, it's not a gimmick like NFTs or crypto, it's an actual tool that we are finding more uses for everyday.

VR and Crypto were bullshit, but AI is the real deal. On a side note I find it hilarious that out of the three options, Zuckerberg bet billions on the two wrong options. Unfortunately the rich have so much power that they can make catastrophic mistakes and still have plenty of money to finally bet on the right one.

How is VR bullshit? No Mans Sky, Elite Dangerous, Half Life Alex, more games everyday are using VR.

Unless you mean the "meta verse" decentraland kinda deal then yeah for sure.

It being the future of computer interfaces is bullshit. I enjoy it as a novelty but Zuckerberg bet on it as the "next big thing", on par with the Internet.

They never stopped to ask if it was actually an improvement and just assumed it's what everyone wanted.

Too bad some things are just more convenient on a screen in front of you. I don't want to walk around a virtual grocery store, the website is fine.

Its a little useful. Its another level of meta. initially research was libraries and books/docs but you could get synopsis from atlases, encyclopedias, dictionaries. Internet allowed for gopher searching and then web browsers allowed search engines but the results did not initially have synapses so you had to check each link. Then synapsis allowed looking through links and just checking the most promising ones. generative ai allows for the most promising links to be identified without perusal. One of the most useful things the ai assitants do is provide you the main links they got their info from.

And document search is just a glorified library 🙄

Don't know why you are being downvoted. This is exactly it. If ChatGPT can find you a solution, then that solution is already out there and it just stole it from some human. That is fundamentally how ChatGPT works, the damn thing can't think.

How, exactly, do you think learning in humans works? We don't just spontaneously know things, we build on others works and iterate improvements towards our learning and discovery. You didn't just know English, you learned it from someone else who learned it ad infinitum until you get back to the earliest stages of complex chemicals we evolved from.

When considered objectively and rationally, intellectual property is among the most insane imaginary bullshit humanity every came up with and actually adopted as a practice, but here we are. Thoughts and prayers.

I heard that the human body can produce more bioelectricity than a battery

Which is bullshit for obvious reasons. Humans are no eels.

In fact, the original script of The Matrix had the machines harvest humans to be used as ultra efficient compute nodes. Executive meddling led to the dumb battery idea .

I love their original idea. Having your brainpower sapped and also being part of a collective dream that creates the world around you is such a cooler and more philosophical idea.

Yea my head cannon is the humans just have no fucking idea what the machines are doing with them and that there was only one movie

This was a far smarter premise. I wonder if it would have been as popular had they kept it.

not really. It's just different energy. Calories can be converted to a unit of heat, a unit of heat is directly analogous to a unit of energy. Electricity is a unit of energy as well. Thus you can compare them. It's how you compare things like electrical production efficiency of a thermal cycle generation process.

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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?

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

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

Do we even need a portal to hell, aren't we living in one?!

Yeah but our hell is out of power. Who cares about that other hell

It's more of a purgatory, or maybe fantasy has no part in dealing with reality

Big Geothermal will try to silence you on this one.

We could just install some heat pumps in hell and transport the energy via flux pipeline to the overworld.

So is AI the new Blockchain?

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.

Or we could stop this ridiculous llm “ai” trend and move towards sustainable living like our hyper-waste society

These comments often indicate a lack of understanding about ai.

Ml algorithms have been in use for nearly 50 years. They certainly become much more common since about 2012, particularly with the development of CUDA, It’s not just some new trend or buzz word.

Rather, what we starting to see are the fruits of our labour. There are so many really hard problems that just cannot be solved with deductive reasoning.

It's simultaneously possible to realize that something is useful while also recognizing the damage that its trend is causing from a sustainability standpoint, and that neither realization particularly demonstrates a lack of understanding about AI.

The lack of knowledge comes from thinking the damage is outpacing it's usefulness. It simply isn't.

All it costs is power, one of the easiest things to make sustainable until we can make a computer that runs on beans.

AI is already too useful to give up, it's not "ridiculous"

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We must disassemble the solar system and make paperclips AI server farms

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.

I 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.

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?

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.

Nvidia Execs: Did you say the price of GPUs should go up?

Yes we will build a massive nursing home and use the old people as batteries.

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

So why won't he use the AI to discover one?

I'm sorry but as an AI language processing model I am unable to discover alternative energy sources. My training data concludes on June 21, 2021 and I am unable to understand requests that would require knowledge after that date.

All the "AI" can do is string together words actual humans have written. Those ChatGPT bots don't think.

The sun gives us free energy. Is he aware of that?

Not efficiently and not as reliably as a nuclear reactor though. It would if they built a space station in an orbit with minimal other objects getting in the way of it and the sun. Teach the ai in between Sol and Venus and bring it back if it discovers anything useful rather than making revenge porn and plagiarizing artists

1 GW of solar is much cheaper than 1 GW of nuclear. Solar is both cheaper to build and cheaper to run. It's the most efficient energy source e currently have.

It also turns on and off outside of any human control.

Plus it doesn't have the con of meltdown and nuclear fallout. Safer nuclear power is still potentially fucking dangerous for life for 20000 years. Nuclear fission energy is the height of human hubris.

Nuclear produces that 1 GW 24/7 and all year though. My solar panels vastly overproduce on most summer days and are worthless at nights and from fall to spring.

If we're still talking about AI, you can ramp up the AI training and batch workloads when the sun is shining and stop them overnight. It's one of those things like aluminum smelters where you can adjust the load

They stop reactors all the time. It'll probably be cheaper to get a massive battery pack+solar

The sun is a fusion reactor.

That is way too hot and uncontrollable for our current tech to tap into. Solar panels are the best we can do for now until we figure out Dyson spheres

Is the answer people? I think I’ve seen this movie before.

Subsidize retrofitting the entire nation with solar and invert it back into the grid

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.

LLMs are a specific application of neutral networks which utilize machine learning.

If those 'buzzwords' aren't ai then what do you think ai is? It's like saying circle and square aren't shapes they're buzzwords

Circles are just marketing hype. Now ovals are a thing, and you can buy some pretty neat ones.

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.

So will AI (or more accurately LLM) be the push needed to make limitless fusion energy a reality?

Obviously not. We’re being faced with an existential threat if we don’t secure alternative, sustainable forms of energy and even that threat isn’t enough to motivate our species.

Threat to existence is nothing compared to ability to hoard more money

He's going after the beryllium agitator, someone stop him.

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.

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.

We could’ve had those reactors if people didn’t say the same things you’re saying 30 years ago.

Let's talk about the technology instead of the dumb word "nuclear". Thorium fission > uranium fission.

Plant near me had a 1000% construction cost overrun and the company that owns it now is always threatening to shut it down if the state doesn't give them more money.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton_Power_Station

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?

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.

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.

Argument ad homunium.

It's a valid point in this case and I'm not attacking your character, I have respect for engineers/designers especially when it comes to reducing pollution. Rather I am attacking your position, which is not without bias, would you not agree on that?

If you mean that I am biased towards following evidence over feelings and like facts over propaganda then yes I am biased. Generally I am not convinced by "nuclear power bad because nukes bad and they are exactly the same according to a Jane Fonda movie I saw".

Nuclear power produces very little pollution and it is of manageable types. Once built it can pretty much outlast any energy source. It is very reliable and can produce energy at the same price for long periods of time. Renewables definitely have their uses and I would be happy if they displaced all fossil fuels.

I totally agree with your second paragraph... but, I honestly worry about bad actors. We see it enough with war. I just don't trust other people to not use the leftovers or to destroy the reactors to not create massive damage. It's seemingly the nature of man.

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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

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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.

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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.

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.

It blows my mind honestly. This is such a young technology that commercialization at this point seems ridiculous

Man, if only there was some sort of energy source that is not only green and renewable, but also outputs a ton of energy rather efficiently…

Nuclear isn’t renewable, it’s just green. We don’t have supernovas on earth making new uranium or thorium.

yes, but extremely toxic and radioactive waste tho.

thorium could be an option

fusion could be an option

or... ya know, we just continue expanding solar and wind energy until we have one of the above.

Yeah, no reason to ever think of alternate options. Just push one or two things until they magically work for everything somehow.

Thorium fuel cycle is nearly the same as the uranium fuel cycle in regards to downsides. It just requires breeders, which you could use with uranium too. The only real benefit of thorium is that it's more plentiful, but the cost in nuclear power isn't in Uranium.

Toxic/Radioactive waste is obviously toxic and radioactive, but how bad that really is is kind of overblown especially if you compare it to the harm caused by popular existing methods like coal/etc. When adjusted based on energy produced, there's more than one study out there showing how Nuclear is significantly safer than coal by a very wide margin. Coal ash is also radioactive and coal plants have very limited requirements to prevent it from escaping to the environment.

Even 'Radioactive Waste' really only feels scary because all of the bad stuff is condensed into a much smaller package when you adjust based on energy produced again.

yes, absolutely. we germans should've shut down coal plants first. but there's no point in reactivating the nuclear power plants, especially because we are literally producing more power than we can use. 60% of which is renewables. some providers will give you energy for basically free, as long as you use it at night when everything shuts down.

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Finally some scifi bullshit he is spewing might actually lead to a good outcome

This is the best summary I could come up with:

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.

The original article contains 525 words, the summary contains 149 words. Saved 72%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

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?