What a waste of power. Somehow they went from “we’re green tech!” to “fuck it, we need ALL the power” real quick. And for nothing.
For profit… somehow.
They are making money off AI. Don’t think they’re not. I don’t understand how, but these company’s are getting profit.
If you look at the enterprise pricing and options for Copilot and Security Copilot, they’re building a pretty obvious business model around automating everything from end user basic tasks to tier 1 incident response.
I’m not advocating that it will work, especially as a person in IR but, all the big players are pushing for security automation. All it’s going to take is one high profile incident to shift the CSO’s and the like to jump in with both hands full of “ai” purchase orders.
The shittiest part is, this is only going to eliminate more entry level secops jobs. Jobs that are generally a great place to start in the industry.
It’s also going to create more headaches for the people left to fix things
“Shut up and use the AI we are paying a fortune for!”
Proceeds to figure everything out for themselves and works themselves to death
This is the real concern I have.
It’s already hard enough keeping a job in IT that doesn’t drive you absolutely crazy, between having to deal with people who still cannot use a computer and people who make a hundred times what you do having every single blink on their screen being a tier one response crisis and the having to do the actual work of it which is building up and establishing the systems that these workers use.
If they also make it so that there’s less need to hire PFYs (pimply faced youths) so that the old blood doesn’t get refreshed with the new blood, then it’s going to tank the entire sector.
Not necessarily. Companies chase what’s popular because it boosts the stock. Executives get bonuses and move to the next hot idea.
Remember when everything was block chain?
No, I mean they are literally making money from it. Asianometry touched on it, but didn’t explain how they were making the profit.
They’re racking in a ton of investment case on AI. I’m sure there’s also a slew of government contracts that keep this beast afloat.
But in terms of real value added to the economy? This seems like its just another Wall Street bubble waiting to pop.
Oh I agree. But the fact is these company’s are seeing actual profits right now.
They’re seeing a flood of new investment, but they’re also absorbing huge losses from within their AI divisions.
The profits they’re reaping are in other sectors.
I think the real pop is going to happen when all of these hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent on AI and then a plucky upstart company actually releases general AI and completely and totally demolishes every company that is building up on it.
That is my prediction and my estimation would be 2030-2032 when that happens.
a plucky upstart company actually releases general AI
Setting aside the very term AGI is ill defined to the point of meaningless, what prevents the bigger company from simply eating the plucky upstart?
You can’t buy what isn’t for sale, I guess.
Hostile takeovers suggest you can.
Are they? The Subprime AI Crisis
it’s venture capital, fueled by the fumes of hopes and dreams and fantasy stories for investors.
Don’t forget that Microsoft isn’t some dumb company trying to jump on the AI bandwagon. They’re a cloud provider and Azure provides lots of AI options.
Microsoft is one of the platforms raking in heaps of money from dumb companies trying to jump on the AI bandwagon. They’re the equivalent of the people selling MAGA shirts outside trump rallies.
Microsoft is one of the platforms raking in heaps of money from dumb companies trying to jump on the AI bandwagon.
True. But one of their biggest customers is OpenAI. A big part of Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI comes in the form of free access to its data centers (which cost money to run, thus costing Microsoft in the short term). By taking advantage of OpenAI’s non-profit status, Microsoft was able to write off a bunch of those losses early on as tax deductions.
But they’re still losses.
Other firms using Microsoft to jump on the AI bandwagon might help make up the difference. But that’s like saying “I’m only doing some of my own heroin, so I still come out ahead”. Given the current rate of return on AI investments, the only truly correct investment value is $0.
That’s a weird take. By that logic, the overall rate of return of Amazon as a company being negative for over a decade says that the only correct investment in Amazon was $0
Amazon is still comically weighted towards AWS. If you could choose which part of the business to own, it wouldn’t be much of a contest.
But, by all means, give Jeff Bezos another billion dollars for his Blue Origin project. See what kind of return that gets you.
Nuclear is green
The plant is actually going to be renamed “Crane Clean Energy Center” so it’s fine!
I can’t wait for this AI bubble to pop.
I’m not saying that some parts of AI have utility - machine learning for medical scans will be a great thing for instance, but the “oooh new! shiny! venture capitalist, line-must-go-up” side of things can well and truly fuck off.
Exactly. I’m bullish on AI, I’m not bullish on what the mass market media calls “AI.”
I don’t think it will pop.
Everyone is trying to get in on the ground floor for actual AI. True AI will be as revolutionary as electricity and online porn.
We are a long way off from true AI. You know how VR was a thing with the virtual boy and then the whole thing died for awhile until the oculus and vive revived the idea like 20 years later? And how VR is basically dead again because it’s still not quite there? AI is basically like that. We’ll get there eventually, but this current trend isn’t going to be enough to get us to true AI. It’ll go quiet again for awhile until there’s some new approach that revives the hype again. Maybe the next phase will do it, but the current AI approach is a dead end from a true AI perspective.
You aren’t wrong; but unlike VR, “dumb” AI has been added to so many devices, used so prolifically, and been invested in so much that it will hold until real AI exists.
AI has already written more on the internet than humans have. There is no reason to believe it is a niche product like VR.
AI has already written more on the internet than humans have. There is no reason to believe it is a niche product like VR.
The internet. Where it gets all it’s training material?
This is not the brag you think it is.
I don’t think it’s a brag. It’s likely more a simple statement of Truth, or at least “near” truth Since the great majority of the internet is not available on a search engine and therefore is unlikely to have been found by an AI
The bar of entry is also far lower. Something like chatGPT or Copilot is magnitudes cheaper and far more useful than a VR headset.
Additionally, large models AI don’t make one physically sick with motion sickness, only mentally.
Can you explain what you mean? True AI? Like AGI or something else?
They want Jane from Speaker for the Dead, they’re going to get Skynet.
True AI is a sentient program that can be creative and evolve it’s own programming. Think digital human analoge, but it knows everything and is easily confused.
Current AI is a party trick performed by a search engine that phrases results in a conversation or a random data generator that can have a theme that informs a comprehensible image.
True AI is a sentient program that can be creative and evolve it’s own programming. Think digital human analoge, but it knows everything and is easily confused.
We’ll achieve fusion as an energy source before we develop what you’re describing. If they’re trying to get in on the ground floor that’s pretty funny.
everyone has a different idea of what true ai will be
AI isn’t a very good descriptor, it’s a catch all for a bunch of different tech. The media does a pretty poor job making that point so people are left to come to their own conclusions about what AI actually is.
aaeven just a machine learning model capable of searching for information and accurately returning an answer with a list of references supporting the claims would be huge for many industries and individuals.
it could help replace customer service with a competent replacement (if the company actually spent the effort to provide necessary features to the customer ui), search through software documentation to help programmers, and hopefully be a better version of what google was.
LLMs are kinda, sorta there already, aren’t they?
Yes and no. They can do the job but they are too easily tricked and too quick to hallucinate to be able to reliably do the job.
Compared to a human after 8 hours of continuous customer support, you’re going to have far more errors of a much greater variety and risk with any current llm models compared to any human that isn’t actively attempting to destroy your company
Why can corporations own nuclear plants? Aren’t they people? Can I own a nuclear plant? Or am I just stuck building additional pylons?
AFAIK, There’s nothing that says you can’t make your own nuclear power plant. Just stuff forbidding you from obtaining nuclear material. Which would make it hard to operate a power plant. But you could still make one that doesn’t do anything!
Strictly speaking, anyone can apply for a license to build a plant but you do need a license. The whole thing is pretty regulated.
The whole thing is pretty regulated.
I feel like that’s probably a good thing.
It’s stifles innovation.
/s
Reminds me of this dude that tried to make a reactor out of americium from smoke detectors.
Most nuclear plants are owned by corporations. Before the accident, Three Mile Island was owned and operated by Constellation Energy (now Constellation Nuclear) and EnergySolutions.
You must construct additional pylons.
Roses are read
Violets are blue
The only additional pylon i need is you 💜
I mean… yeah this clearly sucks ass, but as a silver lining, maybe it’ll rebuild interest in nuclear.
I don’t want old ass nuclear power plants. I don’t want new power plants in 25 years either. I want a solar panel on every single rooftop, and diversified municipal energy storage (batteries, molten salt, geothermal, etc).
Old ass nuclear plants work well, and they are already built. I also want solar panels on every house, and micro turbines in every yard. How about we work with what we already know is clean and expand with new technology.
I don’t think micro turbines are a viable solution. If you’re talking about generators that attach to your downspouts to catch the rainwater and use its falling energy to spin itself, they take several times their own operational life expectancy to return the energy cost of creating them in the first place.
I was thinking more small vertical wind turbines. They also aren’t the most efficient, but any little bit is going to help.
Fission isn’t clean. It’s dirty tech that is necessary because humans are fucking awful at planning for the future on a societal level and a best case scenario of turning some deserts into a radioactive waste hellscape is better than killing all complex life on Earth.
So which oil company pays you? Exxon paid greenpeace to spout this nonsense 50 years ago
Illiterate and guilty of the same sins you doubtless bitch about boomers committing.
It is new… They aren’t the original ones that were decommissioned…
If they want to run AI in a responsible manner I can’t say that I really have any solid complaints. I prefer if they don’t use it to train my entire personality into a model but it is what it is
This is exactly what I’ve been advocating for. Nuclear power, especially if they lift the restrictions on fuel recycling, is the cleanest option we have besides solar and wind, and it’s a technology that is fully developed and available now. Nuclear power is heavily regulated and is very safe these days, and is not reliant on rare earth metals like many solar panels still are.
You’ve been advocating for pointlessly wasting the output of an entire nuclear power plant during a time when an urgent decarbonization of energy is needed, to fuel the energy needs of a corporate monopoly running server farms providing a technology that’s neither wanted or needed outside of niche use cases, following an online hype mixed with scams and rugpull startups that rival crypto’s heydey?
My original idea was for the AI companies to shell out for building new nuclear plants, but bringing an old one back online is a step in the right direction. I don’t think the current “AI” projects aren’t actually worth the resources they consume, but if they’re going to exist, their creators should be shelling out for non-fossil fuel options to power them.
Advocates for clean energy, not nuclear
Against a technology with a lot of hype, that also no one wants
🤔😵💫
a yes, it’s going to be so fun when enshittification hits the power plant and it start leaking radioactive water in the lake
Edit: my issue is with tech companies owning power plants, be it nuclear, oil or gas, enshittification cold fuck all of them and cause catastrophic damage, other than that nuclear power is based
Safest power source per kWh. This is some boomer-ass scare mongering.
Is the problem nuclear? Or the problem the fact that Microsoft AI bullshit needs a full ass nuclear power plant to run it?
Read the comment I replied to.
No, sorry, those were rhetorical questions. I apologize, you’re 100% correct.
Ahh gochya.
I mean, I get why people scoff at it. But look at it from their perspective.
They’re getting heat for all the energy LLMs use. The natural response is to buy carbon free energy and good on them for taking that step, frankly.
If they’ve got to to it… this is probably the better than most ways they could be doing it I suppose.
I’m usually on the lookout for carbon offsets when companies “pledge” to reduce carbon but those are bullshit.
This though? Pretty kick ass.
I don’t fear nuclear power, i fear tech companies especially those public
Are you under the impression Microsoft will be running it themselves? I don’t get it.
The power being used to train AI models = an AI is who’s going to run the power plant.
I guess??
They could just burn coal/oil/natural gas instead and for sure poison everything that way. Nuclear has a fighting chance.
oil spills too
Don’t give power plants to tech companies period lol, at least software can’t fuck as many people and the environment as an oil or radioactive leak could
As opposed to all the other non renewable sources of power cause cancer to those who live near by
AI whatever but nuclear yes pls
There’s a difference between properly funded nuclear power under lab conditions and capitalistically bled-dry, money-before-safety , decrepit cash-grab reactor junkyards that end in leaving miles upon miles of land unusable for generations though.
Would be incredibly ironic if that thing melted down again and took MS’s datacenters with it.
It was only a partial meltdown, some cooling systems failed and it was successfully contained! Safety precautions designed to stop a full meltdown and release of radiation succeeded.
I know that’s not really the point of your comment but I feel like this particular incident has a lot of misinfo and I wanted to help elucidate what happened.
Exactly. A properly run nuclear plant can be extremely safe.
A properly run nuclear plant will also expose people living within a 50 mile radius of the plant to less radiation than if it were a coal fired plant.
Can’t have that!
This isn’t true – radioactive gases were leaked into the surrounding area. The containment vessel remained intact, and NRC concluded that no measurable harm was done, but there was definitely a release and that’s why it was such a big deal. They evacuated children and pregnant women from the area in response.
Nuclear meltdowns are incredibly uncommon though.
I also don’t wish for that. We have enough fear mongering around nuclear power as it is.
It’s not as uncommon as you might expect – here is a list for the curious. And I don’t mean to denegrate nuclear energy as a power source; it is vastly better than fossil fuels and safe when done correctly – I have participated in the safe generation of nuclear power. But the ramifications of it being done incorrectly are severe to say the least, and everyone should be aware that we do commonly have issues with it, especially in aging facilities. We commonly extend plants decades beyond what their initial construction planned for.
Edited to say I just realized you said meltdowns, not radioactive leaks, which I do agree with. Sorry for confusion
I’d like to add that I think North America needs to invest in making Thorium reactors and/or Fast-Breeder systems portable: Nuclear trains sounds stupid until you realize Thorium exposed by a train crash or maintenance issue cannot emit lethal doses, and Fast Breeder fuel spheres are no more dangerous in a sunken ship at the bottom of the ocean than in the emergency cooling tank of a damaged ship or the reactor of a working one.
Cool and normal.
Thank you Kanye
Dystopisn technocracy shit
Oh…
So Microsoft will also be repsonible for taking care of the nuclear waste until it’s not toxic anymore, right? Right??
They’ve taken responsibility for all the arsenic and mercury released from the coal fired power plants they consumed energy from, so I have to assume that they will here too.
