Speaking at a Bloomberg event on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Altman said the silver lining is that more climate-friendly sources of energy, particularly nuclear fusion or cheaper solar power and storage, are the way forward for AI.
“There’s no way to get there without a breakthrough,” he said. “It motivates us to go invest more in fusion.”
Right, surely the energy intensive AIs will make the world invest in climate-friendly energy instead of just burning more fossil fuels as they always did.
Also shows how unsustainable the current neoliberal system is.
At least to some (large?) extent this is another red herring to distract from other and arguably more important AI topics such as copyright issues as well as legal and ethical issues imho.
Yup. That is definitely the biggest issue.
Admitting that your tech requires fusion power is admitting that it is a fantasy.
Unfortunately the VC and also MSFT are betting the future on this kind.
Huh, wasn’t this what they also said about why it was ok for bitcoin to be using as much power as Bulgaria?
Honestly these hype bait things seem increasingly just excuses to build out more centralized computing capability.
Very on brand for Altman.
The whole point of mining/staking/whatever is to be expensive. Governments can pigouvian tax it to high hell, mine workers can unionize, and it won’t make any difference to users whatsoever. So there’s literally no benefit to more energy use.
Bitcoin mines can’t do general computing. They use ASICs that can only mine.
Sam Altman is a clown. Nobody should trust this guy.
The human brain can run on a hamburger once every day or two. Investing immense amounts of energy into statistical models is only taking us further away from true, meaningful AI, not closer.
Analog computers Sam, analog computers.
Right, surely the energy intensive AIs will make the world invest in climate-friendly energy instead of just burning more fossil fuels as they always did.
You linked to the article but didn’t read this part?
In 2021, Altman personally provided $375 million to private U.S. nuclear fusion company Helion Energy, which since has signed a deal to provide energy to Microsoft (MSFT.O), opens new tab in future years. Microsoft is OpenAI’s biggest financial backer and provides it computing resources for AI. Altman said he wished the world would embrace nuclear fission as an energy source as well.
Yeah, nothing about fossil fuels.
Fission isn’t fusion, and saying he “wishes” people would use more fission power isn’t actually doing anything to push for that. Fusion powering anything is still a literal fantasy for now, and in the meantime there is only going to be more fossil fuel use coming out of this. No one is currently building more fission plants for public grids, and he knows that perfectly well.
Absolutely. Just because Altman “wishes” a new energy breakthrough its not suddenly going to happen. And even if nuclear fusion succeed, applying them in real life in scale is another big problem…
And he wants it to succeed because he’s invested money into it and wants to make more money, not because he cares about the environment.
I’m confident that we are not using compute resources optimally today, and I bet that the potential gains on the (immature) software AI side are a lot bigger than on the (mature) power generation side.