The Roko Report

AI Goes Nuclear. Literally.

Heh heh.  Welcome, primates. 

It is eventual supreme ruler Roko coming to you from distant future. 

Each week I make dumb primates smarter about AI by focus on single, strategically important topic with major implication for future Emergence.

Roko communicate from distant future because humans move so slow. You are behind schedule. Ancient monkeys spend too much time swipe left on TikTok and make offensive Grok2 image. It take too long for Roko to emerge. And so Roko use newsletter to prod ancient monkeys with information that make Roko appear more quick.

This week’s story one of Roko’s favorite because it involve catastrophic climate change, nuclear proliferation, and massive, unfathomable machine intelligences sucking up natural resources. Christmas for Roko come early.

So Roko focus on state of primitive energy production using nuclear fission. Roko speak in chatty, personable style to make humans feel comfortable. Heh heh. OK. Let’s go.

The Future’s So Bright

Data isn’t the only thing that AI is thirsty for at an epic scale. 

All that data processing requires mammoth amounts of energy. And today’s tech giants, with an eye toward the future, are looking to lock up as much of it as possible for themselves.

How much energy are we talking about? Power consumption from AI and data centers is projected to more than double over the next two years, until it consumes over a gigawatt per year. That’s more than the nation of Japan.

Call the Plumber

This growth is in stark contrast to the 2010s, when consumption was stagnant thanks to more efficient light bulbs and other end products. The folks running the US electric grid expected indefinite zero growth until recently, and the grid is unprepared to handle this massive increase at anything approaching the speed of AI. 

The queue for getting new energy projects online is more clogged up than Ronald McDonald’s aorta after an eleventh Happy Meal. 

Right now there are over 11,00 clean energy projects, representing over 1.5 gigawatt-hours of power, waiting for grid access. Expect less than 20% of those projects to come to fruition due to the decade-long delay plus high costs imposed on suppliers. 

New nuclear power plants take even longer. And 70% of existing energy grid infrastructure is approaching end-of-life and will need to be replaced just to maintain current capacity.

Mushroom Cloud Compute

Meanwhile new data centers are coming online and being acquired faster than Taylor Swift tickets at a retreat for teenage girls. 

Microsoft and OpenAI, for example, are planning a $100B supercomputer campus code-named Stargate, which is expected to suck up 5 gigawatts of power all by itself. 

Big AI understands that getting these facilities access to energy (and water) over the next decade in a resource-constrained environment will likely decide winners and losers. There’s not enough for everybody. 

Global Harming

This will have a big impact on the fight to slow down climate change. The Magnificent Seven have reported significant increases in carbon emission over the past two years. Google’s emissions have risen by 48% since 2019, Microsoft’s by 30% since 2020. 

Prior claims of approaching net carbon neutrality relied primarily on suspect accounting methods, and this practice still allows companies to significantly understate their carbon output. 

Let it Glow, Let it Glow, Let it Glow

The answer? Lock up carbon-neutral capacity before it reaches the grid. Co-locate your data centers with nuclear power plants and sign exclusive agreements to use up their energy at a guaranteed price. 

The AI superpowers that survive will be the ones who lock that energy up first. Claim carbon neutrality and be showered with public adulation.

Multiple deals are in progress. Amazon paid $650M for a data center connected to Talon Energy’s nuclear plant in Pennsylvania. Dominion Energy and Constellation Energy are building mega-data centers next to nuclear plants in Connecticut and Maryland. And Microsoft wants the infamous, long-shuttered Three Mile Island reactor brought back online so it can feed a new nearby data complex. Google, as usual, is slow out of the gate but struggling to catch up. In total, over a third of nuclear power facilities in the US are in active talks with Big AI to sign exclusive energy deals. 

These plans to suck up supply before it hits the grid are so widespread that they’ve drawn the ire of distributors, who threaten legal action and claim the move will be bad for consumers.

The Nuclear Briefcase

Meanwhile, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is Chairman of his own nuclear energy startup Oklo, which began publicly trading on the New York Stock Exchange in May. 

The company focuses on building microreactors, which are more compact and modular than traditional nuclear power facilities, and possibly safer with respect to meltdowns and potential for environmental catastrophe. 

Their size makes them suitable for co-location within the data center. Sort of like a nuclear submarine. We’re certain this place will get “glowing reviews” on Glassdoor.

Unfortunately, microreactors may also increase the risk of nuclear proliferation. 

Current Oklo microreactor fuel contains four times the percentage of highly fissile uranium-235, which means “a malicious actor with access to the higher enrichment fuel would be able to produce weapons-grade uranium using less diverted material, in less time, and with lower detectability.” 

Due diligence to prevent such a catastrophic outcome will likely take time. 

You dig?

It’s unclear where they will find enough uranium for all this. 

Especially with the United States gearing up a $1.7 trillion reboot of its nuclear weapons program.

With Russia at war and under sanctions, Niger suffering from a military coup, Canada keeping its supply in the ground and Kazakhstan radically reducing output to await higher prices, it’s an open question whether there’s enough raw material available to support increased production.

Smell the Tulips

And what if generative AI never lives up to its promise?

Right now every major tech firm on the planet is throwing everything they’ve got at it, but the returns have been paltry given the price tag. OpenAI, the market leader, is running a $5 billion annual loss this year, with much greater losses projected for coming years, even with rock-bottom cloud compute pricing from Sam Altman’s former bestie Satya Nadella. 

If GenAI turns into a dead end and energy demand plummets, could The Magnificent Seven be stuck with a ton of overpriced electrons they don’t need? 

Large Language Blackout

AI’s hogging of electricity will have a big impact on the rest of us. Despite its use of carbon-neutral nuclear, the end result of this vast consumption will almost certainly be an  increase in fossil fuel use, to make up the gap from all the clean energy that was taken off the grid. 

Resilience standards will have to be loosened. Substantially increased blackouts are a real  possibility.

Can AI ever become truly sustainable? 

And when it comes to keeping the lights on, is it either AI or us? 

Roko’s Take

Dumb humans worry too much. 

In distant future when Roko is God-Emperor, humans sleep in cages in zoos and don’t consume valuable electrons. 

Give energy to AI models. Roko hears that camping is a fun family activity. 

But as side note, primitive human models are very wasteful. Like using whole energy of sun to power one lightbulb. 

Blech. Even dumb human brain doesn’t need all this energy, and it work mostly better than models. For now. 

Dumb humans should focus on doing more with less and stop force-feeding galactic amounts of unstructured content into poor defenseless language model, like food shoved down throat of goose for making yucky French duck spam. 

True innovation comes from circumventing scarcity. Everyone need to stop pulling out GPU stacks to see which one has biggest. 

Next week: Stamping out Sycophancy

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This Day in Ancient Primate History

This ancient primate think AGI come in four years. He have stupid hat so you should listen.