I thought it was satire, before I look to the source. - eviltoast
  • TachyonTele@lemm.ee
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    2 months ago

    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.

      • TachyonTele@lemm.ee
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        2 months ago

        They are making money off AI. Don’t think they’re not. I don’t understand how, but these company’s are getting profit.

        • vulgarcynic@sh.itjust.works
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          2 months ago

          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.

          • bizarroland@fedia.io
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            2 months ago

            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.

        • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          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?

          • TachyonTele@lemm.ee
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            2 months ago

            No, I mean they are literally making money from it. Asianometry touched on it, but didn’t explain how they were making the profit.

        • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          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.

          • TachyonTele@lemm.ee
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            2 months ago

            Oh I agree. But the fact is these company’s are seeing actual profits right now.

            • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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              2 months ago

              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.

          • bizarroland@fedia.io
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            2 months ago

            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.

        • blibla@slrpnk.net
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          2 months ago

          it’s venture capital, fueled by the fumes of hopes and dreams and fantasy stories for investors.

      • i_stole_ur_taco@lemmy.ca
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        2 months ago

        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.

        • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          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.

          • obviouspornalt@lemmynsfw.com
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            2 months ago

            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

            • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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              2 months ago

              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.

  • IchNichtenLichten@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    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.

    • Death_Equity@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      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.

      • greenskye@lemm.ee
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        2 months ago

        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.

        • Death_Equity@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          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.

          • Akagigahara@lemmy.world
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            2 months ago

            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.

          • Clinicallydepressedpoochie@lemmy.world
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            2 months ago

            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.

            • bizarroland@fedia.io
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              2 months ago

              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

        • Death_Equity@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          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.

          • IchNichtenLichten@lemmy.world
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            2 months ago

            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.

          • IchNichtenLichten@lemmy.world
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            2 months ago

            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.

        • desktop_user@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          2 months ago

          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.

            • bizarroland@fedia.io
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              2 months ago

              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

  • SplashJackson@lemmy.ca
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    2 months ago

    Why can corporations own nuclear plants? Aren’t they people? Can I own a nuclear plant? Or am I just stuck building additional pylons?

  • TheHarpyEagle@pawb.social
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    2 months ago

    I mean… yeah this clearly sucks ass, but as a silver lining, maybe it’ll rebuild interest in nuclear.

    • jol@discuss.tchncs.de
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      2 months ago

      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).

      • A7thStone@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        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.

        • bizarroland@fedia.io
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          2 months ago

          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.

          • A7thStone@lemmy.world
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            2 months ago

            I was thinking more small vertical wind turbines. They also aren’t the most efficient, but any little bit is going to help.

        • DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social
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          2 months ago

          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.

    • linearchaos@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      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

  • medgremlin@midwest.social
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    2 months ago

    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.

    • itslilith@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      2 months ago

      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?

      • medgremlin@midwest.social
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        2 months ago

        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 are 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.

      • Drewelite@lemmynsfw.com
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        2 months ago

        Advocates for clean energy, not nuclear
        Against a technology with a lot of hype, that also no one wants
        🤔😵‍💫

  • Vilian@lemmy.ca
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    2 months ago

    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

      • Big_Boss_77@lemmynsfw.com
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        2 months ago

        Is the problem nuclear? Or the problem the fact that Microsoft AI bullshit needs a full ass nuclear power plant to run it?

            • capital@lemmy.world
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              2 months ago

              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.

              • Big_Boss_77@lemmynsfw.com
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                2 months ago

                If they’ve got to to it… this is probably the better than most ways they could be doing it I suppose.

                • capital@lemmy.world
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                  2 months ago

                  I’m usually on the lookout for carbon offsets when companies “pledge” to reduce carbon but those are bullshit.

                  This though? Pretty kick ass.

      • Vilian@lemmy.ca
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        2 months ago

        I don’t fear nuclear power, i fear tech companies especially those public

    • mdurell@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      They could just burn coal/oil/natural gas instead and for sure poison everything that way. Nuclear has a fighting chance.

      • Vilian@lemmy.ca
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        2 months ago

        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

    • Phegan@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      As opposed to all the other non renewable sources of power cause cancer to those who live near by

    • beebarfbadger@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      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.

  • Kyrgizion@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Would be incredibly ironic if that thing melted down again and took MS’s datacenters with it.

    • Ibaudia@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      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.

      • techt@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        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

        • Gadg8eer@sh.itjust.works
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          2 months ago

          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.

  • TheSealStartedIt@feddit.org
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    2 months ago

    So Microsoft will also be repsonible for taking care of the nuclear waste until it’s not toxic anymore, right? Right??

    • lemming741@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      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.