From a Twitter thread a few days ago (lightly edited/formatted), with plenty of criticism in the replies there
Probably batshit crazy but also maybe not-terrible megaproject idea: build a nuclear reactor solely/mainly to supply safety-friendly ML orgs with unlimited-ish free electricity to train models
Looks like GPT-3 took something like $5M to train, and this recent 80k episode really drives home that energy cost is a big limiting factor for labs and a reason why only OpenAI/Deepmind are on the cutting edge
In 2017, the smallest active U.S. nuclear reactor generated ~5M MWh. It looks like that amount of energy would sell for $600M
But it only costs about $150M to generate that amount via a nuclear plant. And larger power plants would give a delta of a couple billion per year between cost and price
The theory of change here is that it would allow Redwood/Anthropic/other future orgs to have a decisive advantage over less safety-conscious ones. This is especially relevant if making an aligned AGI requires a lot more compute (and hence electricity) than making a Clippy
Also, I don’t see why it couldn’t be built in some country with more nuclear-friendly policies...and wouldn’t even have to be connected to the grid I’m thinking of a plant connected to a Boeing plant-sized warehouse full of GPUs and nothing else (except maybe an EA hotel lol)
I legit want to know where on the spectrum from “Hi! 👋 nuclear physicist here. This is incredibly stupid, please delete your account” to “huh this warrants a longer+more rigorous EA Forum post” this seems to fall. Thanks!
From a Twitter thread a few days ago (lightly edited/formatted), with plenty of criticism in the replies there