New York – AI has not quite fulfilled the job-killing, cancer-curing utopia that proponents of the technology tout. So far it has been shown that artificial intelligence is more suitable for generating enthusiasm for the stock market than for achieving tangible big things for humanity. Unless you count Shrimp Jesus.
But that's all about to vary, the AI bulls tell us. Because the one thing standing in the best way of an AI-supported idyll is vast amounts of computing power to coach and operate these emerging AI models. And don’t worry, dear residents who never asked for it – this power doesn’t come from…. I mean, imagine the PR headache.
No, the technology that may save humanity is powered by the technology that just about destroyed it.
Here's the deal: In order to operate AI on the size that the Microsofts and Googles of this world imagine, a number of computing power is required. When you ask Chat-GPT an issue, that request and its response devour power in a supercomputer stuffed with Nvidia chips in a distant, heavily climate-controlled data center.
Electricity consumption from data centers, AI and crypto mining (its own environmental problem) could double by 2026in keeping with the International Energy Agency.
In the US alone, electricity demand is anticipated to extend by 13% to fifteen% per yr through 2030, potentially making electricity a rather more scarce resource. in keeping with JPMorgan analysts.
The tech industry's solution for now’s nuclear power, which is more stable than wind or solar energy and produces virtually no CO2 emissions.
- Microsoft this month secured a deal to restart a reactor on Three Mile Island, the location of the 1979 partial meltdown near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to offer the corporate enough energy to sustain its AI growth. (Not a reactor, after all, but one other one which didn’t fail and continued to operate on the island for years after the incident.)
- Amazon is working to construct an information center campus directly on the location of a Talen Energy nuclear power plant in northeastern Pennsylvania.
- Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, can be investing heavily in nuclear energy, serving last week as chairman of Oklo, a nuclear startup received approval Site investigations begin for a “microreactor” site in Idaho.
- On Monday, the Financial Times reported that the enterprise capital firm Founders Fund, co-founded by Peter Thiel, is backing a nuclear startup that’s attempting to develop a brand new production method for a more powerful nuclear fuel utilized in modern reactors.
And while predictions of AI's demise are sometimes dismissed as alarmist predictions, people fearful about nuclear power can't be dismissed so easily. History is tragically on their side.
Of course, nuclear energy is best understood today than it was in 1979, when there was a partial meltdown at Three Mile Island's Reactor 2, Anna Erickson, a professor of nuclear science at Georgia Tech, told me.
“Nothing in life is ever foolproof,” she said, “but we are now much better at understanding the operation of nuclear reactors,” thanks partially to the wave of safety regulations that the Three Mile Island incident unleashed.
Conclusion: There is not any AI future with out a significant increase in our electricity supply, making nuclear expansion virtually inevitable. But it should take years for most of the recently announced projects to return online, and which means Big Tech data centers can have to remain on the fossil fuel drain as demand continues to surge.
Are all of us okay with destroying the planet if we only get apps that may summarize our email? Or engines like google that sound a bit more human but are less reliable? Is the long run really only a variation of crustacean-based deities in a sea of AI stuff?
According to AI developers, there’s quite a bit at stake – including our jobs, the environment and our overall sense of the world. And yet it stays unclear what we as a people expect from the deal.
The CNN Wire
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