Artificial intelligence is energy-hungry and as companies race to make it bigger, smarter and more complex, its thirst for electricity will increase even further. This sets up a thorny problem for an industry pitching itself as a powerful tool to save the planet: a huge carbon footprint. Yet according to Sam Altman, head of ChatGPT creator OpenAI, there is a clear solution to this tricky dilemma: nuclear fusion. Altman himself has invested hundreds of millions in fusion and in recent interviews has suggested the futuristic technology, widely seen as the holy grail of clean energy, will eventually provide the enormous amounts of power demanded by next-gen AI. “There’s no way to get there without a breakthrough, we need fusion,” alongside scaling up other renewable energy sources, Altman said in a January interview. Then in March, when podcaster and computer scientist Lex Fridman asked how to solve AI’s “energy puzzle,” Altman again pointed to fusion. Nuclear fusion — the process that powers the sun and other stars — is likely still decades away from being mastered and commercialized on Earth. For some experts, Altman’s emphasis on a future energy breakthrough is illustrative of a wider failure of the AI industry to answer the question of how they are going to satiate AI’s soaring energy needs in the near-term. It chimes with a general tendency toward “wishful thinking” when it comes to climate action, said Alex de Vries, a data scientist and researcher at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. “It would be a lot more sensible to focus on what we have at the moment, and what we can do at the moment, rather than hoping for something that might happen,” he told CNN.
Full report :ChatGPT’s boss claims nuclear fusion is the answer to AI’s soaring energy needs. Not so fast, experts say.
