A.I. News Sam Altman Says Future AI Depends On Energy Breakthrough

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https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/24/01/18/2352248/sam-altman-says-ai-depends-on-energy-breakthrough

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman on Tuesday said an energy breakthrough is necessary for future artificial intelligence, which will consume vastly more power than people have expected. Speaking at a Bloomberg event on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos, Altman said the silver lining is that more climate-friendly sources of energy, particularly nuclear fusion or cheaper solar power and storage, are the way forward for AI.

"There's no way to get there without a breakthrough," he said. "It motivates us to go invest more in fusion." In 2021, Altman personally provided $375 million to private U.S. nuclear fusion company Helion Energy, which since has signed a deal to provide energy to Microsoft in future years. Microsoft is OpenAI's biggest financial backer and provides it computing resources for AI. Altman said he wished the world would embrace nuclear fission as an energy source as well. Further reading: Microsoft Needs So Much Power to Train AI That It's Considering Small Nuclear Reactors

Sam Altman Says AI Depends On Energy Breakthrough - Slashdot

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman on Tuesday said an energy breakthrough is necessary for future artificial intelligence, which will consume vastly more power than people have expected. Speaking at a Bloomberg event on the sidelines of the World Economic...

hardware.slashdot.org

Thousands of Scottish homes to be powered using waste heat from Edinburgh supercomputer

Researchers at the University of Edinburgh believe waste heat can be stored in abandoned mine workings and used to power homes

www.itpro.com

 

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AI Tokens as Currency

In our projected AI-centric future, AI services become integral to nearly every aspect of our lives, with AI tokens emerging as the primary medium for these services. As such, AI tokens naturally assume the role of a currency.

This development is driven by our increasing reliance on AI across all facets of life and the essential role of foundation AI models in facilitating our interactions with these sophisticated systems. Originally designed for measuring and managing computational tasks, AI tokens gain substantial value due to their critical role in enabling access to AI services.

These tokens are set to become a universal standard in transactions, transcending AI-specific applications to cover a broad spectrum of goods and services, akin to the historical functions of gold and fiat currencies.

Supported by a strong and ever-expanding AI infrastructure, AI tokens are likely to offer a viable alternative to the traditional and often unstable financial systems. As our world gravitates towards a digital and AI-enriched landscape, AI tokens are on course to evolve into a borderless currency, central to international economic transactions. This marks a significant paradigm shift in financial systems, paving the way for an economy deeply integrated with and driven by artificial intelligence.

Economic Efficiency measured by FLOPs per joule

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Tokenomy of Tomorrow: Envisioning an AI-Driven World

Examining the significant influence that AI is expected to have on our economic frameworks.

cacm.acm.org

 

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OpenAI founder Sam Altman is building a global network of dedicated chip fabrication plants

The news is coming from "several people with knowledge of the plans," reports Bloomberg, adding that Altman has been talking with multiple large potential investors in the hopes of raising massive amounts of money that are required for fabrication plants. They're not cheap, into the tens of billions of dollars... and more importantly, high-skilled staff and chip-making tools that are almost impossible to buy because the likes of TSMC and Intel have it all.

Altman knows there is a future AI GPU shortage coming, as companies like NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel can't get them AI GPUs fast enough. NVIDIA is ramping up production of its AI GPUs with next-gen "Blackwell" B100 AI GPUs coming this year and a beefed-up "Hopper" H200 AI GPU coming soon. AMD just launched its new Instinct MI300X AI GPU, and Intel is ramping up its AI GPU efforts... but it's not enough.

OpenAI founder Sam Altman is building a global network of dedicated chip fabrication plants

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wants to use billions of dollars setting up a network of factories to manufacture semiconductors, future AI processors.

www.tweaktown.com

 

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AI may eventually consume a quarter of America's power by 2030, warns Arm CEO

An IEA Electricity 2024 report warns that ChatGPT requests costs nearly 10 times more than a Google search in power

www.tomshardware.com

In an interview cited by The Wall Street Journal earlier this week, Rene Has, CEO of Arm, warned of AI's "insatiable" thirst for electricity, stating an increase to as much as 25% of the U.S.' current 4% power grid usage from AI datacenters is possible.

Rene himself may have been citing an International Energy Agency report from January stating that ChatGPT consumes roughly 2.9 watt-hours of electricity per request, which is 10 times as much as a standard Google search. Thus, if Google made the full hardware and software switch with its search engine, Google would consume at least 11 terawatt-hours of electricity per year from its current 1 TWh.

The original report says one example of a standard 2.9-watt-hour would be running a 60-watt-hour lightbulb for just under three minutes. Similar to the standard deviation of ChatGPT queries to standard search engines, industry-wide expectations for Artificial Intelligence power demands are expected to increase tenfold.