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OpenAI CEO Altman: future AI depends on energy breakthrough (www.reuters.com)

submitted 1 year ago by sculd to c/technology

15 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

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[–] tardigrada 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] sculd 2 points 1 year ago

Yup. That is definitely the biggest issue.

[–] megopie 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] sculd 2 points 1 year ago

Very on brand for Altman.

[–] explodicle@local106.com 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] rimu@piefed.social 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Admitting that your tech requires fusion power is admitting that it is a fantasy.

[–] sculd 3 points 1 year ago

Unfortunately the VC and also MSFT are betting the future on this kind.

[–] spaduf@slrpnk.net 10 points 1 year ago

Sam Altman is a clown. Nobody should trust this guy.

[–] noxfriend 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[–] tal@lemmy.today 6 points 1 year ago

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.