Is nuclear the answer to AI's problems?
8th February 2024
Welcome to AI Collision 💥,
In today’s collision between AI and our world:
AI is not the bomb some expect
Underground sites
Taco cats
If that’s enough to get the energy atomising, read on…
AI Collision 💥 breakthrough power is the masterkey for AI
In May 2023, The New York Times ran an article that reads:
A.I. Poses ‘Risk of Extinction,’ Industry Leaders Warn
Leaders from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic and other A.I. labs warn that future systems could be as deadly as pandemics and nuclear weapons
It’s about an extreme a take on AI that you’ll find.
The crux of the argument (don’t bother trying the link, it’s behind a paywall) was that AI’s existential risk to humanity is up there with the highest of threats we face in our modern world.
I mean, they quote “leaders” so it must be taken seriously, right?
Right?
Well, it seems these leaders might have got their nuclears mixed up.
The threat of AI is minimal. In fact, I’d go so far as to say there is no threat at all.
And that with every great technology revolution, early on, even from those in the industry, there is fear and uncertainty.
Change is scary, even when you’re the ones making the change. And it’s easy to think of the bad things it can do… but you also need to look at the good things, the unforeseen things, the opportunities it opens up.
And it’s in the nuclear realm that things get interesting with AI.
Not nuclear weapons…
But nuclear energy.
You see it’s these same AI leaders that are well aware that the future of their technology relies on something that we all heavily rely on.
Energy.
The thing about our modern world is that it’s built on foundations of technology. Layers of it, that build up and up over time to resemble what we use today. And that will continue into the future as we build better tech using the great tech that we have access to today. And that unlocks huge opportunities that we see unfold in markets all the time.
I call this technological compounding.
However…
It is all built on a technology that none of it can exist without – energy in the form of electricity.
If you remove electricity from the equation, all of it, and I really mean all of it, ceases to function.
Ever tried using a computer without electricity?
How good is your smartphone to you if the battery isn’t powered by electricity?
Sure, sure, you can get energy from sources like solar and wind, these are “free” energy sources right? Well last time I checked there was no commercially viable smartphone with solar panels on it.
And where are those solar-powered cars?
You need the technology that creates energy, regardless of the source, to enable our world to exist.
Not only that but you also need an increasing abundance of it. And here’s the thing, as AI grows, it demands more power to operate. Bitcoin sceptics use this as an argument as to why bitcoin shouldn’t exist, that it’s too energy-intensive. These same sceptics are levelling their ire at AI too now.
To a point, they’re right. The power demands of these technologies are huge. But they often omit (we wonder if intentionally) the work underway to ensure new tech like AI isn’t a huge impact to the energy demands of everything else in the world.
The same AI leaders have quickly figured out that for AI to have its full impact on the technology of the future, it needs more energy and, realistically, the cheapest, safest, cleanest and most abundant energy source we have access to right now is nuclear energy.
This is why the price of uranium has more than doubled in the last year as the realisation of the need for more nuclear energy has hit the market.
The spot price went from around $47 this time last year to now over $100. That alone is a great investment.
But it means the race is on for nuclear development. The problem is that building traditional nuclear power plants is long, laborious and take years and years… and years to get to commissioning.
Unless there was a way to build, smaller, perhaps, modular reactors that were easier to build, faster to get pumping out the energy and cheaper to build and run…
This is a still image from one of my CES videos. It’s one that I took at the Doosan Corporation (KS:000155). It’s the company’s development project of small modular reactor (SMR) technology in partnership with NuScale Power (NASDAQ:SMR).
Called the VOYGR-12, it’s the latest generation of NuScale’s SMR development. Doosan is helping them to make all the bits and pieces that come together to make the SMR function.
What I loved about this is that at a consumer technology show, I was looking at the latest in SMR tech. Now, NuScale is early stage, developmental and it’s not the only SMR tech company in the world trying to build out new nuclear technology.
Doosan, is a giant of industry, so for it to be working on this too is saying something about the importance and potential of SMR tech.
For me, it’s also crucial to the future of AI. And possibly any other new technology that comes around, be it spatial computing quantum computing or any levelling up of our high-tech world.
It’s one of the more interesting areas of energy, and something to pay a lot more attention to in 2024.
AI gone wild 🤪
Part of how I first got into bitcoin in 2010 was when on some deep web forums people were talking about how a guy had paid for pizzas using this online digital currency called bitcoin.
And heading to the “Bitcointalk” forum you could see what was going on. It was all new, weird, kind of cool and still very fringe.
Then in 2011 an article emerged on the popular blogging site, Gawker, by a guy called Adrien Chen.
The title of the piece was, “The Underground Website Where You Can Buy Any Drug Imaginable.”
This piece went viral, mainstream, and was picked up on news sites everywhere. It highlighted the Silk Road, which was a deep web site where you could actually buy any drug imaginable.
Its primary currency was… bitcoin.
Anyway, it blew up, the price of bitcoin at the time, awareness, notoriety, etc, etc.
I bring all this up because I’m suffering from a case of Deja-vu (kind of).
An article hit my feed in the last couple of days, the headline reads, “Inside the Underground Site Where ‘Neural Networks’ Churn Out Fake IDs.”
I don’t know if this was a nod to Chen’s piece from 13 years ago, but it has similar kinds of themes. New breakthrough tech, weird (criminal) applications of it, all of that. It smells a lot like 2011 to me.
Anyway check out the article, it’s great. And it’s a sure-fire sign to me at least about how much AI is going to change our world.
Boomers & Busters 💰
AI and AI-related stocks moving and shaking up the markets this week. (All performance data below over the rolling week).
Boom 📈
Gorilla Technology (NASDAQ:GRRR) up 90%
Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) up 12%
Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) up 3%
Bust 📉
Symbotic (NASDAQ:SYM) down 10%
Duos Technology Group (NASDAQ:DUOS) down 6%
iRobot (NASDAQ:IRBT) down 10%
From the hive mind 🧠
Trust me, you can go down a deep rabbit hole about unread texts from Mount Vesuvius and other “lost” ancient scrolls. So rather than go down that rabbit hole, why not get AI to do it, and pocket $700,000 along the way.
Do you think that extra croissant you snuck into the bag was a “win” at the self-checkouts? Were you a little apprehensive that you’d be found out? Well, thanks to AI your thieving ways will no longer get past the exit!
What have we learnt from earnings season this quarter? What did big tech tell us is the future of earnings? Ok, it’s not hard to guess. Yahoo Finance! takes a look at it anyway, and what’s coming next.
Artificial Polltelligence 🗳️
This week’s poll is all about the king of AI stock kings, Nvidia. I’ve been in long debate with my brother about where it heads next. I don’t want to influence your view though, so have your say below.
Weirdest AI image of the day
Taco Cat may be palindromic, but Cat Taco is weird – r/Weirddallee
ChatGPT’s random quote of the day
“There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary numerals, and those who don't." - Ian Stewart
Thanks for reading, and don’t forget to leave comments and questions below,
Sam Volkering
Editor-in-Chief
AI Collision
