This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Holy sunk cost fallacy, batman. How fucking much does it cost to operate an ENTIRE GODDAMN NUCLEAR REACTOR just to fuel a tech project that nobody wants???
that nobody wants
lol
Investors want it, because they want to ride the wave towards profit. It doesn't matter if it's good, sustainable or not. That is what matters.
A tax break for "clean energy", "strategic investment corridor" or "self-poweting companies" to reduce the load on the grid (that a few enormous companies like MS are creating) will be written into law, if it isn't already, and it will be a complete tax write-off or something so they get to reap any rewards and when AI hype dies down they'll still have increased profits by reducing taxes. When you win/win by owning the system you just win.
A lot of the cost is building a giant centralized nuclear facility. Once they are built it is not nearly as expensive to run them.
I think this is generally a good thing. Companies should be thinking of ways to supply their power needs.
Having said that, people want a good AI. The LLMs they are working on are probably not that. I am very skeptical we are anywhere close to where the hype train has taken us
I am all for nuclear power, but I'd rather it be from modern reactor designs and builds, and I'd rather it not be wasted on bullshit.
Hey now that's not fair. AI can randomize your music playlists, summarize an email, write terrible code, steal others work, and completely invade your privacy.
What's that? Oh, I guess you're right, we could do all that stuff already.
Ironically, the power hungriness of AI might actually do good for the environment if it normalizes nuclear energy.
Quite the twist
I just hope this deal doesn’t involve using their AI to monitor the reactor …
There actually has been good work on using AI to control fusion plasmas its at the point where it can keep them stable significantly better than any human or simple automated system.
Yes in a research lab. Here we’re talking about Microsoft.
Have you ever used something they made? Did it meet your standard of being “good work”? No. It’s a greedy, soulless cash grab disguised as software that infects the entire organization and disables common sense.
M$ actually running a nuclear plant is a guaranteed disaster. Blue Screen of Death.
You know, that actually makes sense. Fusion is so energetic and probabilistic in nature, plus it's effectively "charged fluid dynamics" and there are an impossible number of variables to handle. That's literally the kind of shit AI is great at.
Fission though? Not so much
No, stick rod in / pull rod out doesn't really need deep learning to make work well :p
Apparently, I didn't learn that with my ex
Personally? I don't think this is a bad idea. The less they drain from the grid, the less they consume fossil fuel.
The reactor isn't active right now, and they are a PWR design, and like the 1979 incident showed, they do fail safely.
So long as Microsoft pays for the operation of the plant? Seems reasonable to me if they're going to consume an assload of energy with or without public support.
we could use that extra energy to offset a bunch of existing carbon emissions now. This is still waste. If it's going to be started up again, and its energy used for something useless, it's waste.
Microsoft would do it with or without the power plant. Make no mistake about that.
The same argument could be said if they made a 1GW solar farm, or any other form of power generation. Unless you have a way to legislatively prevent Microsoft from producing their own energy or prevent acquisition of decommissioned plants, I don't see how you can prevent waste.
Is it going to be started up again?
If M$ doesn’t invest into this for their own purposes, is it still going to be started up? Or is your position that M$ should be investing in a nuclear power plant for the good of the world?
Because while I can agree with the idea, we all know that would never happen. So if it was never going to be started up again, we are at 0 gain or loss no matter what they do with it.
And that’s ignoring the fact that they are apparently intending on using that energy anyway.
That argument presupposes that the reactor would otherwise be brought back into operation, which I don't think is necessarily the case.
I remember I had to do the 3 mile Island incident as part of my university degree. Apparently one of the biggest problems was that the control interface was hard to understand for the human operators.
So I guess if they just replaced the control system with a modern computer that would fix most of the problems. Obviously not a Windows system, otherwise we've just got the same issue all over again.
I think I saw a movie like this.
It doesn't end well. 💀
Based on their Windows updates history, this seems like a bad idea. Nuclear boogaloo let's goooooo
I'm sure that everyone will recognize that this was a great idea in a couple of years when generative LLM AI goes the way of the NFT.
