This is the best summary I could come up with:
Training large language models is an incredibly power-intensive process that has an immense carbon footprint.
Now, The Verge reports, Microsoft is betting so big on AI that its pushing forward with a plan to power them using nuclear reactors.
Yes, you read that right; a recent job listing suggests the company is planning to grow its energy infrastructure with the use of small modular reactors (SMR.)
But before Microsoft can start relying on nuclear power to train its AIs, it’ll have plenty of other hurdles to overcome.
Then, it’ll have to figure out how to get its hands on a highly enriched uranium fuel that these small reactors typically require, as The Verge points out.
Nevertheless, the company signed a power purchase agreement with Helion, a fusion startup founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman earlier this year, with the hopes of buying electricity from it as soon as 2028.
The original article contains 346 words, the summary contains 147 words. Saved 58%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
The thought of a nuclear reactor running on Windows is terrifying.
They’re going to build it in 2026 but it’ll still somehow be running on XP.
“What operating system is that running?”
“Uh… vista.”
“We’re all going to die!”
They’ll probably not use Windows, instead opting for an OS that is proven to work with already running reactors, like QNX
A lot of them do IIRC, windows 98 is popping into my mind as an instance I’ve read of
Ah yes you’re correct, Windows 98 is (was?) the British nuclear submarines
Like Microsoft uses Windows for anything that matters since they got rid of Balmer.
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.
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.
Getting half a dozen of those built and in use would be exactly the kind of thing that tech billionaires are actually good for.
Hm… risk of nuclear disaster? Or more expense? Hm… I’ll have to think about this one.
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.
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.)
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/
I can’t handle this . i’m going to sleep.
AI needs that’s much power?
Fuck you, ditch it like a Zune and make some more video games.
I miss my Zune. Oddly enough, every person I’ve met who had a Zune had it stolen, including me.
Mine was never stolen, to break your streak. I had one of the little 4GB ones.
The power consumption is factored into the cost of AI. It’s still profitable after that, or they wouldn’t be doing it.
It’s the biggest buzzword right now, it doesn’t matter if it’s profitable. I doubt most uses are directly profitable right now. It’d more of a FOMO situation - if we don’t use AI, we’re OBSOLETE! AHHH!
If it turns out not to be profitable in the long run then people will stop.
Should we never even experiment?
Here’s a nice video of a guy training an AI to do a relatively simple task (driving a Trackmania trac) with a very limited amount of inputs with low variability, 2-3 outputs and very hardset restraints.
Compared to what he does, a rather narrow defined re-enforcement training scheme, Microsofts AI takes many more inputs and has many more outputs and all the inputs are highly variable (massive amounts of data like dictionaries, images, movies, entire texts, speech, etc compared to a handful of parameters with values from -1 to 1) and also is a mix between re-enforcement, supervised and unsupervised training. With different subnetworks trained for different things eventually working together to do the master task they have in mind.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dw3BZ6O_8LY
What is shown in the video is what you’d do for a tiny subsystem of the AI Microsoft, Google, Apple and the like develop.
Kinda like if you watched a video about “this is what it takes to make the bolt that keeps your wheels on your car” you’d only have seen a fraction of what it takes to make the whole car.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dw3BZ6O_8LY
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
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