Tech meets (handshake emoji) energy
Tech-bros are coming for the electricity
"Less than the price!" - Nat Friedman
It's almost always a good idea to charge more for your product than it costs, and this is exactly what Github is doing with it's AI product Copilot, according to former Github CEO Nat Friedman. Friedman weighed in after a WSJ story claimed that Github was losing money on Copilot.
We all know that normal economics don't apply to tech companies because, you know, the "user is the product" or "scaling" for monopoly or some such catch phrase, but it does seem that at least Copilot is subject to normal finance. The broader point of the WSJ piece is however around how tech cos are struggling to turn AI into profit, due at least in part to high energy costs needed for the compute part of the product.
The twitter (it will always be twitter to me) debate around the ostensibly high energy consumption of LLMs reminded me of the good-old days of when crypto was going to consume all the world's power. Now it's AI's turn I guess.
if Jigar Shah is to be believed on twitter (and of course we do1), ChatGPT is already an additional 10GW. That's a lot of chips slurping up a lot of data and a lot of electricity. My observation though, is that different AI tech seem to have different energy consumption profiles (citation needed - just my observation for now!). Self-driving cars for example manage to do all the compute onboard, but LLMs seem to be a totally different beast. I've seen grumbling about the "carbon footprint of GenAI" and this is only going to get louder.
While the LLMs driving GenAI might be exacerbating the energy problem for tech cos, energy is not a new problem for them. I've long been a fan of Google's efforts in the energy space, which I've written about before, and more recently Microsoft has made some stellar contributions. An aside: I did chuckle at this "Not everyone is Microsoft" joke from a BNEF corporate sustainability analyst talking about MSFT's carbon offset work.
Nuclear is back...maybe
Microsoft actually did something rather intriguing a while back - they quietly posted a job for a "Principal Program Manager Nuclear Technology." The job description talks about SMRs (Small Modular Reactors) and a "technical assessment for the integration of SMR and microreactors to power the datacenters that the Microsoft Cloud and AI reside on."
As far as I can tell, Microsoft has not said anything really about this program, but it makes total sense to me. If I had millions of GPUs gulping up power at an alarming rate, I'd want to explore all options on the table. The renewable energy programmes at all the tech cos are reaching some maturity now too, so it does strike me as prudent (such a fitting word for nuclear) to assess if fission can help!
This is just one of the Ws nuclear has been taking recently (if you don't understand this sentence, please ask your local GenZ or LLM to translate). Just this week, a draft EU agreement listed nuclear as a "net-zero technology" and Rolls Royce placed an order for "a fuel design for it's small modular reactor" with Westinghouse. I'm not sure how substantial this last announcement is, but I'm always curious when old-school engineering firms do new-age stuff.
Also, earlier this year Terresterial Energy completed a regulatory review of their motlen-salt tech, so that's exciting too!
The nuclear story is of course not without detractors (side-eyes at a certain green NGO) and challenges - this Mckinsey&Co piece breaks the latter down nicely. Costs of nuclear is the one thing that always dampens my enthusiasm for the tech, but the engineer in me that loves big machines doing amazing things can't help but be a little excited for nukes!