back to article Altman reportedly asks Biden to back a slew of multi-gigawatt-scale AI datacenters

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is reportedly trying to convince the Biden administration that an enormous network of AI datacenters, each consuming up to five gigawatts of power, is imperative to ensuring US national security and maintaining its technological lead over China. The proposal, detailed in a document reviewed by Bloomberg …

  1. Ace2 Silver badge

    What a stupid idea.

    1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Artificial Intelligence, Real Stupidity.

    2. herman Silver badge

      AI == Absolute Insanity

  2. Chris Gray 1
    Thumb Down

    marketing?

    Is he just ridiculously overasking in order to actually get something a lot smaller?

    Not a fan of this current round of "AI" stuff. How about we actually put some smarts into it first?

    Current stuff has its uses, but Altmann is way over in the crazy realm with this.

  3. amajadedcynicaloldfart

    I am beginning

    to wonder whether this man fancies himself as an alternative, but nonetheless superior, oilsnake salesman to Musk. That is to say, a bigger conman...

    1. herman Silver badge

      Re: I am beginning

      The widgets Musk makes, mostly works.

  4. CheesyTheClown

    Energy waste in this scale

    The law of conservation has a lot to say about this.

    Energy is extracted either from fuel or collected from natural resources such as wind and solar. It is the transmitted at a loss over high tension cabling across sometimes long distances where energy is lost. Of course lost means that through radiation (not nuclear) and other methods, it’s released into the environment as heat.

    Then it’s fed into cooling systems which don’t actually cool, but instead move heat from hot places to cooler places. The heat being moved is radiated by semiconductors and of course resistors.

    Energy cannot be created or destroyed. This is a law, not an idea.

    If we produce gigawatts or terawatts of electrical energy, it is released into the environment and more importantly the lower atmosphere.

    There really isn’t such a thing as green energy, especially at this scale. There is only greener energy.

    We need to realize that 10 years of additional R&D is a much better investment than more energy sources. For example, if we build quantum dot based semiconductors and move from electronics to photonics in semiconductors, we can fit super computers that fill data centers now into telephones. While I LOVE OpenAI products, even though I’m alread 50 years old, I can wait 10 more years for a better solution.

    OpenAI should also be fined for not increasing efficiency enough. Their algorithms are possible a dozen orders of magnitude off of where they could be. Also, AI GPUs from NVidia are insanely wasteful. We don’t need GPGPU circuits to run graph based neural networks.For a simple hack we should be building NPU cores that closely mirror FPGAs. Make a huge sea of low precision FP cores connected by and gates and flash cells which connect neighboring cores based on models.

    We have such a long way to go and telling OpenAI that they have to improve their algorithms is a much better solution than giving them more power.

  5. Groo The Wanderer Silver badge

    Geez but Altman is a greedy and self-serving pig!

  6. IGotOut Silver badge

    Please....

    ...build this at the tax payers expense, so I can make even more money....oh and can I also pay lower rates of taxes.

    1. codejunky Silver badge

      Re: Please....

      @IGotOut

      "...build this at the tax payers expense, so I can make even more money....oh and can I also pay lower rates of taxes."

      Thats what it sounded like to me too. I hope not but I am cynical.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Back to the Future of AI

    Like Doc Brown would say: "The only power source capable of generating 1.21 gigawatts of electricity is a bolt of lightning."

  8. DS999 Silver badge
    Facepalm

    He's saying the government should build them?

    Build it and they will come? Shouldn't there be a use case for countless billions of dollars worth of investment and all the CO2 that would be released first?

    If it is that critical he should hit up all the billions and get them to chip in. If he can't convince them, I'm not sure why the taxpayers should be on the hook to fund his wet dream!

  9. harmjschoonhoven

    25 Watt

    Would US national security not be better served by investing in human brains?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: 25 Watt

      It's f*king unbelievable how supremely inefficient current AI tech is, where six 5 GW datacenters would consume as much power as the brains of 1.2 billion humans, and produce nothing but virtual crop fertilizer (to be generous) as output.

      If it did manage to produce outputs as valuable as those of 400 million humans (33% cognitive efficiency) then that would potentially double the productive output of a country of 400 million, which is valuable. But at present it feels more like enthusiastic mindsturbation, hardly worth the energetic back-and-forth!

      1. GenericLeftieWhackjob

        Re: 25 Watt

        As befitting my name, I can't help notice that that much juice could provide a comfortable living to a lot more people and possibly discover the next generation of great minds.

        To wit: "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Altman's pet algorithm than in the near certainty that people of greater talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops."

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I thought AI was smart?

    Can’t it figure out a way to work without power?

  11. MachDiamond Silver badge

    Oh yes

    It's very expensive and investors aren't funding it as much as they used to. Let's get a government to pay for it! Yeah! They're suckers for useless tech and as failed attorneys, anything with a blinking light is "tech".

  12. FuzzyTheBear
    Stop

    In a country

    where the warming is felt to the extent it is , and the grid that barely holds just running ac's so people can survive the idea to use power at those levels for that purpose is insane. Microsoft has even awsked to fire back up Three Mile Island , yes .. TMI . Time to say no to these projects .

    1. Jimmy2Cows Silver badge

      Nuclear hysterist

      You might have had a point about TMI, were it the same TMI reactor that melted down. It is not. They just want to reinstate one that was perfectly functional when it was deliberately shut down.

  13. ChrisElvidge Bronze badge

    The Register reached out to OpenAI for comment; we'll let you know if we hear anything back.

    Can't you just ask ChatGPT?

  14. Czrly

    It's Power.

    For long and long, I've considered the connection between "crypto" and "A.I." to be the fact that both are bubbles of the most ephemeral kind but, today, I think I've been wrong about that: both are about consumption of power – Watts!

    Precisely how the megalomaniacs are punting A.I. is pretty obvious but *why* they're so desperate to do so makes little sense. Is their really enough money to be made from rendering artists, authors and many others redundant? Maybe they're set on positioning themselves to capture "human culture" or something by flooding the channels with 'botshit' but even that seems a little too desperate to motivate the scale of the infrastructure investments. (It would also be too dystopian or nefarious: the megalomaniacs are not that inspired.)

    But Watts of power? This is all a counter-move to the acceleration and expansion of green energy.

    This is about keeping legacy power-plants operational. This is about keeping the oil-economy flowing and ensuring that green sources cannot hope to bring about the decommissioning of fossil-fuel sources in the short term. This is about keeping old establishments like OPEC relevant as puppeteers of the world economy.

    This is also a cynical act but cynical, short-termism is right on-brand for the megalomaniac.

    Perhaps they know that "A.I." is stupid and a bubble and hated by the masses and laughably prone to hallucinations and not fit for any purpose in the real world. They do not actually care because "A.I." – the entire industry – is just a "cost centre" to them. Bad press, loathing, even infrastructure wastes are just "costs" and their profit lies elsewhere: these maniacs are firmly rooted in traditional economic structures, investments, markets and capitalism and granting the oil-economy a final lease on life serves them, there. Keeping fossil-fuel chains alive keeps their lobby relevant in government and international institutions.

    They're seeing Watts of green power becoming available on the grid and so they strive to sink as many Watts as possible into something: not crypto, now, but A.I.

    For Satisfactory players, the TL;DR is this: A.I. is just the AWESOME Sink of real life.

    1. GenericLeftieWhackjob

      Re: It's Power.

      Wouldn't shock me none. Rotten people propping up other rotten people.

    2. MachDiamond Silver badge

      Re: It's Power.

      "Is their really enough money to be made from rendering artists, authors and many others redundant? "

      Yes. That's not everything in one package, but so much music these days is already AI. Not bands you would know, but the subscription background music you hear in retail shops, restaurants and yes, elevators. The music companies own the copyrights outright to all of that and don't have any of the costs that go with paying real people. Art? Feed in all of the "Master's" paintings where the copyright has long since expired and ask the computer to create more in that style. Buy the rights to all of the works of an artist with a distinctive style such as Kinkade or Lichtenstein, not the tangible works, but the rights and be able to output more the the same that can be sold inexpensively at decorating stores as well as limited editions for more money when something pops out exceptionally good.

      I'm not as sure about literary works. As a big reader, the dexterity of really good authors can be both easy to spot and very subtle at the same time. I'm not so sure that an AI can capture the creative written word that a human author can produce. For factual documents and news, there isn't the same twist of mind required as there is for fiction.

      So yes, chopping the irritating artist out of the production chain and being able to produce stuff on demand and to a schedule will be a boon for the industry managers.

    3. MachDiamond Silver badge

      Re: It's Power.

      " but *why* they're so desperate to do so makes little sense."

      The most money is to be made by jumping on the wagon just as it begins. Even if it's a total bust, stock prices will catapult from single to many digits in a short course to time (IPO mania). At that point, a smart Vulture Capitalist will cash out and look for the next thing to come along with a good story. They could stay in, but it's highly doubtful that they see the same rise again and just like that most new businesses will fail, the era of the dotcoms taught us that most of the unicorns are going to die young.

  15. GenericLeftieWhackjob

    What a world.

    Dig a ditch to the river so the rich can poison it, then the government bills you for their shitting in it and meanwhile you have to pay for your own filter so your use of the water doesn't poison it BY THE SAME PEOPLE who dump gallons of shit in it.

    I keep hearing about entitlement reforms - where can I sign to get the 15 millionaires off my back?

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Did he explain how the ability to generate fake cat videos is a technological lead over anything?

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon

Other stories you might like