The rate-limiting step in AI - Energy:
The rate-limiting step in AI - energy.
Energy is the backbone of everything.
Everything is downstream of energy.
Everything.
Your ability to move, eat, sleep and have the basic necessities of life is based on energy.
Energy is the input to everything.
Without energy, you have nothing.
As energy prices go up, everything else retracts.
Don’t think tech people are factoring that in for the growth of AI.
Everyone is hearing about AI these days.
How it’s a revolutionary change in humanity.
How it’s going to change everything for the entire world.
And it will.
AI’s enablement is like that of the Internet.
There will be a pre-AI world and a post-AI world.
But to run a lot of AI systems, you need a shit ton of energy.
Listened to a Mark Zuckerberg podcast this weekend and he gets it.
He knows what it takes to build large AI systems.
He’s spent billions of dollars on computing power to power his AI models.
He said what some people aren’t realizing is the energy input to train some of these models.
This tweet has a good summary
The real world has physical constraints on energy they just can’t overcome.
As he said, software is barely regulated while energy is extremely regulated.
You can’t just build massive power plants to run AI compute models overnight.
That takes decades of work and a lot of power.
If technologists want AI to keep growing, they’re going to need a ton of energy.
My bet is it comes through nuclear.
Nuclear is our answer to climate change.
It’s our answer to growing as a species and scaling technology.
We just assume we’ll be able to turn on our computer and power of lives.
But what if that ability was a privilege?
Not something we take for granted every day?
AI models will continue to grow.
They just won’t grow at an exponential pace.
The physical world will limit the technological world.
Don’t know if enough technologists understand this.
The rate-limiting step to scaling AI is energy.
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