I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Fuck this “AI” nonsense, the techbros shoving it into everything, and the Bitcoin cryptobros that came before them.
I don’t understand, clean nuclear power has never been easier. Why not just build some current gen nuke plants?
As I understand it, planning new, grid-scale nuclear power plants takes 10-20 years. While this isn’t a reason not to start that process now, it does mean something needs to fill the demand gap until the nuke plants (and other clean sources) come online to displace the dirty generation, or demand has to be artificially held down, through usage regulation or techniques like rolling blackouts, all of which I would imagine is pretty unpalatable.
I think it’s fair to predict energy consumption will continue to rise. With that timescale, it’s basically “the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second best time is today”. Doesn’t solve the immediate issue, but if we keep not starting new nuclear projects, it’s going to remain an issue forever.
Oh, I totally agree – didn’t mean to give any impression otherwise. Filling the energy demand gap as quickly as possible with the least impactful generation source should be very high on societal goals, IMO. And it seems like that is what’s happening, mostly. Solar, wind, and storage are the largest share of what’s being brought up this year:
That’s an amazing chart!
It takes a long time to get a nuclear plant up and running. While it would be great to replace coal plants with nuclear, it wouldn’t help with all of the power being wasted on AI right now.
Very sustainable technology, this AI 😎
and the techbro ais are mostly a novelty so far…
I mean, it’s all runing on general purpose hardware. If we decoded 4k video on general purpose hardware we’d use more power than every AI company put together, but once that became popular we developed chips capable of decoding it at the hardware level that consume barely any power.
And the exact same thing is starting to happen with dedicated machine learning chips / NPUs.
Let’s have a round of slow claps for the tech industry.
First the “whole ass country of energy use to make fake money” that is bitcoin and now this?
Lovely.
How fucking convenient.
This is a bad article, with a misleading headline.
It shows no direct connection between the two, it just talks about how AI models are less power efficient than search engines, and then talks about how all industries including normal, non AI data centers, manufacturing, etc, are all increasing power usage.
there’s that window closed.
What kind of world are we going to leave behind for the AI though?
It’ll be a coal-powered Dyson sphere sustaining data center tasked with generating pictures of celebrity porn, Jesus, flight attendants, babies and seafood. By then AI will enjoy them as much as my mother does.
“I’ve cut out these goatees made of felt for us all to wear until we can grow real ones.”
