The rate limiting step in AI - energy

Energy being the limit to scaling AI systems
Apr 22, 2024
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The rate-limiting step in AI - Energy:

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The rate-limiting step in AI - energy.

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Energy is the backbone of everything.

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Everything is downstream of energy.

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Everything.

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Your ability to move, eat, sleep and have the basic necessities of life is based on energy.

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Energy is the input to everything.

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Without energy, you have nothing.

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As energy prices go up, everything else retracts.

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Don’t think tech people are factoring that in for the growth of AI.

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Everyone is hearing about AI these days.

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How it’s a revolutionary change in humanity.

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How it’s going to change everything for the entire world.

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And it will.

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AI’s enablement is like that of the Internet.

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There will be a pre-AI world and a post-AI world.

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But to run a lot of AI systems, you need a shit ton of energy.

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Listened to a Mark Zuckerberg podcast this weekend and he gets it.

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He knows what it takes to build large AI systems.

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He’s spent billions of dollars on computing power to power his AI models.

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He said what some people aren’t realizing is the energy input to train some of these models.

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This tweet has a good summary 

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The real world has physical constraints on energy they just can’t overcome.

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As he said, software is barely regulated while energy is extremely regulated.

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You can’t just build massive power plants to run AI compute models overnight.

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That takes decades of work and a lot of power.

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If technologists want AI to keep growing, they’re going to need a ton of energy.

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My bet is it comes through nuclear.

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Nuclear is our answer to climate change.

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It’s our answer to growing as a species and scaling technology.

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We just assume we’ll be able to turn on our computer and power of lives.

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But what if that ability was a privilege?

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Not something we take for granted every day?

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AI models will continue to grow.

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They just won’t grow at an exponential pace.

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The physical world will limit the technological world.

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Don’t know if enough technologists understand this.

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The rate-limiting step to scaling AI is energy.

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'Keep Going You're Doing Great'

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