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A corporation running a nuclear reactor to train AIs might just be the most cyberpunk news headline I’ve ever seen.
This gave me an idea for some level design I might want to use in a video game.
I’d play that, the fact that you’d include this content sounds dope
I just like element-based levels in video games. Even water levels. Some even can present some time-based challenges, like saving a nuclear reactor from meltdown, or retrieving something from an area like that.
I wanna play your game lol
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Better than coal or oil, it might even result in more R&D into reactor designs.
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.
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.
Environmental groups are the biggest opposition to new nuclear builds.
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.
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.
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.
You can recycle lithium batteries.
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.
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.
Cortana, can you design a nuclear reactor to train you better?
Yes daddy
Searching “Design a nuclear reactor to train you better” on Bing…
This is part of their plan to reduce carbon emissions.
This is what corporations mean when they say “reduce carbon emissions”
You say that like it’s a bad thing
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.
I thought this was a generic nuclear bad response, but in that case I definitely agree.
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
So we finally get thorium power, but its only used to make celebrity porn for incels.
Hey, whatever keeps them out of Walmart parking lots at 1am.
Like there’s somewhere better to buy celebrity porn at 1am. Psh. I’ll believe it when I see it.
Nice!
Honestly getting Thorium power AND never having Incels leave their home or interact with society again sounds like a win-win.
requires an intensive carbon footprint
Maybe we should focus on the collapsing ecosystem then instead of training AI datasets.
Nuclear power means they can do both.
Hear me out:
What if we used that nuclear power only to fix the environment?
Ok, find someone willing to pay for one for that purpose.
Microsoft isn’t ‘we’
No. Nuclear power is not anti climate like the other fossil fuels, but still anti ecosytems.
How exactly is a nuke plant antiecosystems? Under that guise, pretty much anything humans do is as such.
Uran mining & nuclear waste.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think you have misread the comment you replied to.
Indeed. Using nuclear power avoids causing trouble to the ecosystem.
AI might be a fantastic tool to help fix the environment, though.
People aren’t listening to human scientists and you think they’ll be happy with an scary AI saving the planet?
If they’re not listening to humans or AI, then they’re not going to be happy with anything and should probably be ignored.
Unfortunately it’s hard to ignore the people running your country.
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.
It will be used to drive more consumption.
It will be used for both. The way out of global warming is going forward in technology, not backward.
We already use AI in climate change models. This is a large language model that honestly, we don’t need.
bold of you to assume microsoft is interested in that
We already know how well Microsoft optimizes code, so this comes as no surprise.
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.
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.
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.
The solutions are there, but 💫capitalism💫
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.
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.
Solution already magically arrived. It’s called nuclear
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.
How much nuclear waste are we talking about? Every time I’ve seen any actual quantity mentioned, it’s tiny.
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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.
Weird thing is, I’d trust them to not abandon the reactor during a budget shutdown…
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.
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.
They’ll ship it to India/Thailand
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?”
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.
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?
They might get bored though. Maybe hook them up to some kind of virtual reality world.
Yes, and they could just live in the virtual reality so they never have to stop providing power. It’d be perfect
Imagine spending chunks of time in there hooked up to a device set to lose weight. Essentially just setting your intake to -300 calories a day and spending a month in there.
Essentially just setting your intake to -300 calories a day and spending a month in there.
It’s called meth.
I mean you could have the AI make interesting scenarios for them!
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this is the matrix
woosh
NO, this is Patrick
That’s the joke. The Wachowskis both ended up being trans sometime after they made The Matrix.
This is lemmy but it’s cool you can access it from matrix.
It would cost more energy to feed them then they would produce. /s
That’s just energy conversion. Loss is expected.
This is what happens when you don’t teach your kids the Laws of Thermodynamics in school…
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The reason is ultimately irrelevant, but I welcome more nuclear energy.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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:
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have long-term planning and production goals to reach
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have employees who must be planned
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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.
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“And you pause training while you dont.” lmao I don’t know why people keep giving advice in spaces they’ve never worked in.
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.
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.
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.
The more people who invest the better the tech becomes the more the price comes down. Nuclear is excellent base energy
This is false. Nuclear has a very competitive levelized cost of energy (LCOE). Nuclear has high upfront costs but fuel is cheap and the reactor can last much longer than solar panels. The big picture matters not just upfront costs.
Source: https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2015/08/f25/LCOE.pdf
Yo better check your fuel prices: https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2023/09/21/why-uranium-prices-are-soaring
Plus imagine how expensive uranium will get once we start relying on nuclear. It’ll be the new oil.
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.
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.
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…
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Sucks to wait for the sun to come out to make Bing answer though. “Disclaimer: Answer dependent on cloud cover or night time”.
Do you seriously think that Bing trains an AI model when you send a request? Why would they do that?
Oh, they’re working on it. It’s dumb, but it’s happening.
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?
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.
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.
You’d get used to it awfully fast though.
are you arguing solar is more economical than nucleae cause if so youre wrong by a longshot
That was true 20 years ago. You are working off extremely outdated information.
No, you are. Solar is much cheaper than nuclear is.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The article here is literally talking about a company that wants to.
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.
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…
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?
Because it costs less money
to push the cost tofor taxpayers to subsidize it than owning itCorrection
Those data centers are paying for their electrical usage. Economies of scale just make it more favorable for them over building their own power generation (solar/wind excluded).
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Tell me you know nothing about data centers without telling me.
Tell me more about how capitalists efficiently allocate resources.
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.
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.
One of the important skills you learn as a science fiction fan is the ability to understand what fiction means.
Then please learn what a facetious joke is.
God pls send the singularity I tire of this meat 🙏
This comment was a joke right? “Launch the nukes”? What nukes?!? Do you not know the difference between nuclear power generation and nuclear bombs?
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.
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
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.
It definitely could because AI can only reflect what it’s trained off of and the only sapience to train off of is humans.
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.
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
I guess history does repeat itself. Next you’ll be telling me that 640GB of RAM is enough.
Someone let me know when personal computers need TB of RAM
Windows 13 isn’t that far away.
!Remindthem 6 years
Will the LLMs be useful for dating?
LLM stole your girl
Hi bing. How do I stop a nuclear reactor from going critical?
For those correcting my error It was just a joke. The only things I know about nuclear power I learned from the simpsons and Kyle hill
you turn it off.
“critical” is the normal operating state of reactor when it’s working. what you want to avoid is supercriticality, which means that power is rising. if it’s delayed supercritical but prompt subcritical, power rises and may or may not stop on its own at some point. when it’s prompt supercritical, you don’t even have time to ask https://www.nuclear-power.com/nuclear-power/reactor-physics/nuclear-fission-chain-reaction/reactor-criticality/
Modern reactor design also pretty much makes runaway reactions nearly impossible, as in, you have to actually try to fuck it up.
Even Fukushima didn’t have a runaway reaction, it just lost coolant.
Don’t turn it on? Critical means a reaction that is exactly self sustaining, i.e. a constant power level.
Buy MS office subscription.
LLM seemed really impressive at first, but it made it to “this year’s NFTs” in record time.
