• Godort@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      38
      ·
      1 year ago

      They’ll probably not use Windows, instead opting for an OS that is proven to work with already running reactors, like QNX

    • scarabic@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      33
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • threelonmusketeers@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        9
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        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.

        • scarabic@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          11
          ·
          1 year ago

          Getting half a dozen of those built and in use would be exactly the kind of thing that tech billionaires are actually good for.

          • prole@sh.itjust.works
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            6
            ·
            1 year ago

            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.

            • scarabic@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              2
              ·
              1 year ago

              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.

        • bemenaker@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          1 year ago

          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.

        • scarabic@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          11
          ·
          1 year ago

          Hm… risk of nuclear disaster? Or more expense? Hm… I’ll have to think about this one.

          • PlexSheep@feddit.de
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            1 year ago

            Your logic is fallacious: the solution is not to build a nuclear reactor but seek an alternative.

            • scarabic@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              8
              ·
              1 year ago

              Yes I understand. It was a cheeky reply. But alternatives are actually limited if you consider all the benefits of nuclear: high energy output, limited land use, no dependence on weather or time of day, no massive subsidy to Chinese manufacturing, no carbon, all resources mineable in the US, waste all physically contained…

              Got alternatives to that?

              • PlexSheep@feddit.de
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                1
                ·
                1 year ago

                The best alternative is probably a diversified system of sustainable energy sources, along with batteries.

          • Anamana@feddit.de
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            edit-2
            1 year ago

            Hm… invest into your companies cybersecurity before or after you get hacked?

            Companies don’t care enough about risks if they are not forced to account for them.

    • 9point6@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      1 year ago

      A lot of them do IIRC, windows 98 is popping into my mind as an instance I’ve read of

    • Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      Reminds me of that time the technodork ran his minecraft reactor with opencomputers and lost his base because the computer blue screened. Almost as funny as that time the entire city lit up because they were using raw radio signals to control their reactor and a nearby thunderstrike instructed the reactor to drop all the fuel and go supercritical. This is why you add realism to video games, it leads to hilarious stuff like this.

      EDIT: That was actually the same server where they sabotaged the entire electrical grid to blow up everyone’s base as a send-off and mine was the only one standing at the end because I was the only one who bothered to set up a surge protector under OHSA (Omega Haxors? Safety!? AHAHAHAH!) it just so happened that the system designed to save the grid from my many exploits just so happened to work in reverse.

    • Rakonat@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.)

  • ascense@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    188
    ·
    1 year ago

    A corporation running a nuclear reactor to train AIs might just be the most cyberpunk news headline I’ve ever seen.

  • qaz@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    173
    ·
    1 year ago

    Better than coal or oil, it might even result in more R&D into reactor designs.

    • thepianistfroggollum@lemmynsfw.com
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      85
      ·
      1 year ago

      Yeah, I don’t understand why building a relatively clean energy source is a bad thing. Reactors are now like 3+ generations past the versions that were super dangerous. Hell, they even have reactors that can use spent fuel from other reactors.

      • lemmyvore@feddit.nl
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        58
        ·
        1 year ago

        Oil lobby and other interests. Follow the money. Plus it’s easy to play on people’s fears about radioactive waste.

        Oh well, countries that know what’s what just quietly build and use their reactors and go about their business. Finland for example is set for a while now.

          • lemmyvore@feddit.nl
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            10
            ·
            1 year ago

            Which is ironic because they like electric vehicles, and spent car batteries will soon become just as big of a problem as nuclear waste.

            It’s a bit of “not seeing the forest for the trees” situation, we have an immediate climate problem we’re trying to stave off, if these are the things that will wean us off fossil energy than that’s what we have to do for now and we’ll cross that other bridge when we come to it.

            • Richard@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              2
              ·
              1 year ago

              The fallacy here is that any reactor that you initiate for planning even immediately at this very moment will come years or decades too late to affect our power composition and keep us under 1.5°C, which means that such projects distract society from the importance of green/renewable energy solutions like wind or solar, which we CAN expand very quickly and which WILL have a measurable effect on mitigating the effects of climate change. Solar and wind are the only things that can replace fossil in time.

              • lemmyvore@feddit.nl
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                3
                ·
                1 year ago

                True, but let’s not forget that there are lots of perfectly good reactors sitting around unused, who could be brought back online within a practical time frame. Existing reactors is really what the debate is about, not those that don’t exist.

        • scarabic@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          9
          ·
          1 year ago

          Someone on here made an interesting argument showing how conservative politicians are actually pushing nuclear hard. They do this to steer interest away from other renewables, but also because they know nuclear will go nowhere. It’s politically unviable with voters and regulatory bodies. The point is that the bottommost issue is public perception and bias against it. If we could overcome that, we’d at least have a fighting chance.

    • scarabic@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      42
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      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.

          • Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            4
            ·
            1 year ago

            It is, because corporate greenwashing will tell you that they reduced their emissions when all they did was scale up production using green energy. Their actual emissions didn’t go down they just went down relative to their growth.

            • qaz@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              2
              ·
              1 year ago

              I thought this was a generic nuclear bad response, but in that case I definitely agree.

  • negativeyoda@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    164
    ·
    1 year ago

    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

  • NocturnalMorning@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    88
    ·
    1 year ago

    requires an intensive carbon footprint

    Maybe we should focus on the collapsing ecosystem then instead of training AI datasets.

        • Stuka@lemmy.ml
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          14
          ·
          1 year ago

          Ok, find someone willing to pay for one for that purpose.

          Microsoft isn’t ‘we’

        • FaceDeer@kbin.social
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          9
          ·
          1 year ago

          You’re free to invest in nuclear power for that purpose if you want.

          Microsoft is investing in nuclear power to run their AI projects. They likely wouldn’t be investing in nuclear power if they didn’t have projects that needed it like this.

          • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            13
            ·
            1 year ago

            And the U.S. government wouldn’t have invested in all of the development that went into the Apollo program if they didn’t want to beat the Russians, but we still all benefitted from the science and the research and the development.

      • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        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.

      • ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.de
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        1 year ago

        Only if there’s a meltdown, and that’s near-impossible with current reactor designs. Just don’t build in very disaster-prone areas like Florida or Japan.

      • Rayspekt@kbin.social
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        25
        ·
        1 year ago

        People aren’t listening to human scientists and you think they’ll be happy with an scary AI saving the planet?

        • FaceDeer@kbin.social
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          11
          ·
          1 year ago

          If they’re not listening to humans or AI, then they’re not going to be happy with anything and should probably be ignored.

            • FaceDeer@kbin.social
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              3
              ·
              1 year ago

              I doubt the people running the country are worried about a “scary AI saving the planet.” Their main concern is ignorant masses of voters who are scared of it.

      • hanni
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        16
        ·
        1 year ago

        It will be used to drive more consumption.

        • MxM111@kbin.social
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          4
          ·
          1 year ago

          It will be used for both. The way out of global warming is going forward in technology, not backward.

  • Havald@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    72
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • Silverseren@kbin.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      63
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • Nilz@sopuli.xyz
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        23
        ·
        1 year ago

        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.

        • Richard@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          1 year ago

          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.

          • Nilz@sopuli.xyz
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            3
            ·
            1 year ago

            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.

    • lolcatnip@reddthat.com
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      20
      ·
      1 year ago

      How much nuclear waste are we talking about? Every time I’ve seen any actual quantity mentioned, it’s tiny.

    • eestileib@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      17
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.

    • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.

    • wahming@monyet.cc
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      1 year ago

      Weird thing is, I’d trust them to not abandon the reactor during a budget shutdown…

    • Ð Greıt Þu̇mpkin@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      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.

    • frezik@midwest.social
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.

    • Chailles@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      Governments can barely figure that out,

      Governments aren’t exactly known for efficiency. A corporation is less likely to bogged down by just the mere fallacy that “other entities can’t figure it out, why should they do it?”

  • EmperorHenry@discuss.tchncs.de
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    70
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • PlexSheep@feddit.de
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      33
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      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.

      • Steve@communick.news
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        23
        ·
        1 year ago

        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.

      • eestileib@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        17
        ·
        1 year ago

        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).

        • FooBarrington@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          9
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          While you are right about baseload being more satisfiable through nuclear, you are wrong that it’s in any way important for AI model training. This is one of the best uses for solar energy: you train while you have lots of energy, and you pause training while you don’t. Baseload is important for things that absolutely need to get done (e.g. powering machines in hospitals), or for things that have a high startup cost (e.g. furnaces). AI model training is the opposite of both, so baseload isn’t relevant at all.

          • eestileib@sh.itjust.works
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            3
            ·
            1 year ago

            It’s not life-critical but it is financially-critical to the company. You aren’t going to build a project on the scale of a data center that is capable of running 24/7 and not run it as much as possible.

            That equipment is expensive, and has a relatively short useful lifespan even if not running.

            This is why tire factories and refineries run three shifts, this isn’t a phenomenon unique to data centers.

            • FooBarrington@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              2
              ·
              1 year ago

              It’s not life-critical but it is financially-critical to the company. You aren’t going to build a project on the scale of a data center that is capable of running 24/7 and not run it as much as possible.

              Sorry, but that’s wrong. You’ll run it as much as is profitable. If electricity cost goes up, there is a point where you’ll stop running it, since it becomes too expensive. Even more so considering that AI models don’t have a set goal to reach - you train them as long as you want and can, but training a little bit extra will have diminishing returns after a while.

              That equipment is expensive, and has a relatively short useful lifespan even if not running.

              Not really, the limiting factors in AI training are mostly supply of cards. The cards already in use will stay in use until they fail, they won’t be replaced with newer cards the second they get released.

              This is why tire factories and refineries run three shifts, this isn’t a phenomenon unique to data centers.

              This is comparing apples and oranges, since tire factories:

              • have long-term planning and production goals to reach

              • have employees who must be planned

              • have resource input costs that are higher than electricity

              Of course you want the highest utilisation that you can economically reach, but a better comparison would be crypto mining - which also has expensive equipment that has a relatively short useful lifespan even if not running, and yet they stop mining when electricity is too expensive.

          • guacupado@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            1 year ago

            “And you pause training while you dont.” lmao I don’t know why people keep giving advice in spaces they’ve never worked in.

            • FooBarrington@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              2
              ·
              1 year ago

              What are you trying to imply? That training Transformer models necessarily needs to be a continuous process? You know it’s pretty easy to stop and continue training, right?

              I don’t know why people keep commenting in spaces they’ve never worked in.

              • guacupado@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                1
                ·
                edit-2
                1 year ago

                No datacenter is shutting off of a leg, hall, row, or rack because “We have enough data, guys.” Maybe at your university server room where CS majors are interning. These things are running 24/7/365 with UU tracking specifically to keep them up.

                • FooBarrington@lemmy.world
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  arrow-up
                  1
                  ·
                  edit-2
                  1 year ago

                  What are you talking about? Who said anything close to “we have enough data, guys”?

                  Are you ok? You came in with a very snippy and completely wrong comment, and you’re continuing with something completely random.

          • Richard@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            3
            ·
            1 year ago

            Not only that, imagine how thrilled nature and the environment will be at massive extraction efforts ripping apart landscapes to provide fuel for a method of generating power that is obsolete since at least three decades by now.

            • docmox@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              3
              ·
              edit-2
              1 year ago

              Don’t need to, just down-blend from the available fuel used from weapons put out of commission as a result of disarmament treaties.

              Now, about those materials used to construct solar panels…

          • docmox@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            1 year ago

            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.

      • wrinkletip@feddit.nl
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        1 year ago

        Sucks to wait for the sun to come out to make Bing answer though. “Disclaimer: Answer dependent on cloud cover or night time”.

            • FooBarrington@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              1 year ago

              I can’t imagine they are. What would the training data of those models be? Why would you train the model when the user sent a request? Why would you wait responding to the request until the model is trained?

              • frezik@midwest.social
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                1
                ·
                1 year ago

                Often, these models are a feedback loop. The input from one search query is itself training data that affects the result of the next query.

                • FooBarrington@lemmy.world
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  arrow-up
                  1
                  ·
                  1 year ago

                  Sure, but that’s not done with the kind of model this thread is about (separate training and inference). You’re talking about classical ML models with continuous updates, which you wouldn’t run on this kind of GPU infrastructure.

      • jackpot@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        1 year ago

        are you arguing solar is more economical than nucleae cause if so youre wrong by a longshot

          • frezik@midwest.social
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            11
            ·
            1 year ago

            Yeah, I don’t know where nuclear advocates got the idea that their preferred method is the cheapest. It’s ludicrously untrue. Just a bunch of talking points that were designed to take on Greenpeace in the 90s, but were never updated with changing economics of energy.

            I can see why Microsoft would go for it in this use case. It’s a steady load of power all the time. Their use case is also of questionable benefit to the rest of humanity, but I see why they’d go for it.

        • frezik@midwest.social
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          7
          ·
          1 year ago

          The people who actually put money into energy projects are signalling their preferences quite clearly. They took a look at nuclear’s long history of cost and schedule overruns, and then invested in the one that can be up and running in six months. The US government has been willing to issue licenses for new nuclear if companies have their shit in order. Nobody is buying.

          • prole@sh.itjust.works
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            1 year ago

            Yes, because humans in a capitalist society are always well known for making the best decisions possible based on the good of humankind. Nothing else factors in whatsoever.

            For anyone too thick, profit. Profit factors in above literally everything else. And short term profit at that. We shouldn’t make decisions of what’s best for society based on what massive corporations decide is best for their bottom line.

            • frezik@midwest.social
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              edit-2
              1 year ago

              If you’re implying nuclear would be the better option outside of profit motive, please stop. We have better options now.

              If we cleared every hurdle and started building reactors en mass, it would be at least five years before a single GW came online. Often more like ten. Solar and wind will use that time to run the table.

              Edit: Also, this is a thread about a company dedicating a nuclear reactor to training AI models to sell people shit. This isn’t the anti-capitalist hill to die on.

            • frezik@midwest.social
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              1 year ago

              Invest in a next generation technology that is yet unproven, but hopes to solve the financial problems that have plagued traditional reactor projects. And years away from actual implementation, if it happens at all.

    • Richard@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      1 year ago

      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…

    • realharo@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      43
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      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.

      • Duamerthrax@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        1 year ago

        Or you get an overlord ai that isn’t dependent on the larger power grid so it doesn’t have any reason not to launch the nukes. You know they’re going to harden these things.

        • The_Mixer_Dude@lemmus.org
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          10
          ·
          1 year ago

          One of the important skills you learn as a science fiction fan is the ability to understand what fiction means.

        • prole@sh.itjust.works
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          4
          ·
          1 year ago

          This comment was a joke right? “Launch the nukes”? What nukes?!? Do you not know the difference between nuclear power generation and nuclear bombs?

          • Duamerthrax@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            1 year ago

            Yes. It’s just a joke about Skynet and AM. People are really quick to jump to dogpile without realizing it’s a joke. The idea wasn’t that it would use its reactor as a weapon, but it would access the military’s weapons. Without needing outside power, it have no reason not to.

          • SnipingNinja@slrpnk.net
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            1 year ago

            You misread that comment, they are saying that the power generation will be detached from the grid if they go this way and then if the AI gains control of nuclear bombs (separate thing from what the article is about) like shown in fictional stories they’ll not have a reason to not use it as they won’t be afraid of affecting their own power generation

        • Mossy Feathers (She/They)@pawb.social
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          1 year ago

          Yeah, being ruled over by something without any accountability or oversight is a terrible thing. I’m so glad we don’t live in a world like that. /s

          Honestly, I’m not sure an AI could fuck it up any worse than humans are.

          • Duamerthrax@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            3
            ·
            1 year ago

            It definitely could because AI can only reflect what it’s trained off of and the only sapience to train off of is humans.

    • Pipoca@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.

  • Astroturfed@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    53
    ·
    1 year ago

    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?

  • sixCats@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    52
    ·
    1 year ago

    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?

      • Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        1 year ago

        I’m genuinely floored this is the comment you were replying to. What does that even mean??!

          • Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            5
            ·
            edit-2
            1 year ago

            Because it literally is. If you knew the exact terms to get the the AI to recreate something in its training data, it could, 1:1. And if you ask it to create you something new, no matter what parameters you use it will look like a mess of garbage data. Generative AI is literally just art laundering just like how Language Models are writing laundering. We tend to use humanizing language but ultimately it’s a machine which uses a bunch of dials and levers to determine how much % a work should resemble one piece in its training at a particular point of the work and how much it should resemble another in another. There’s a reason why a lot of modern image bots have literal fucking watermarks all over their outputs. Because the images were flat out stolen.

            The tech itself is pretty neat, you’re essentially making a virtual brain and having it do useful work, but ultimately all the capitalists running these tools see it as is another method to bring the public under their exclusive and totalitarian control. We could have had a cool roboartist putting out new and unique works but instead we get people losing their job because an inept system hyped up by silicon valley fart huffers claimed it could do their work for free and it only gets worse as these AIs use their own garbage outputs as training data.

            • regbin_@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              7
              ·
              edit-2
              1 year ago

              If you knew the exact terms to get the the AI to recreate something in its training data, it could, 1:1.

              That’s because you told it to. Don’t make it recreate existing art then.

              And if you ask it to create you something new, no matter what parameters you use it will look like a mess of garbage data.

              This is not always true. You can train it on a certain style and a photo of a random object, then have it generate an image of the random object in that style. It will “understand” the concept of a style and an object.

              ultimately all the capitalists running these tools see it as is another method to bring the public under their exclusive and totalitarian control.

              Exactly why I’m not supporting the closed source paid services (Midjourney, ChatGPT, Bing Chat, DALL-E etc.) and instead advocate for open source projects like Stable Diffusion and LLaMA.

              • Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                3
                ·
                edit-2
                1 year ago

                That’s because you told it to. Don’t make it recreate existing art then.

                If you took a random concept and explained it to a person they could using their existing knowledge set, draw it somewhat competently. That is because people are able to apply knowledge to make something new. If you told someone to recreate something that already exists, even if they’re a professional, would never be able to recreate it no matter how much time and effort the put into it. AI can do the latter because it’s basically copying, and it can’t do the former because there’s nothing to copy from.

                • regbin_@lemmy.world
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  arrow-up
                  6
                  ·
                  1 year ago

                  If you took a random concept and explained it to a person they could using their existing knowledge set, draw it somewhat competently. That is because people are able to apply knowledge to make something new.

                  Theoretically it can, but it would involve meticulous and proper labeling of each training data. Currently most of the trained data are automatically labeled and they’re not descriptive/verbose enough. I believe the improvements from the latest version of DALL-E is due to OpenAI’s use of a more advanced image labeler.

  • Pxtl@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    42
    ·
    1 year ago

    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