Generative AI has a clean-energy problem
What happens when the AI revolution meets the energy transition
When a colleague from this newspaper visited Sam Altman in 2022 at his home in San Francisco, he noticed two pairs of pink high-tops on a bookshelf. One had the logo of Mr Altman’s machine-learning startup, OpenAI. The other bore an emblem for Helion, a nuclear-fusion company that Mr Altman also backs. The entrepreneur is obsessed with both technologies—not just as foot fashion. He believes that the cost of intelligence and the cost of energy will fall in a mutually sustainable way. He calls it a “long and beautiful exponential curve”.
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This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline “There will be blood ”
Business April 13th 2024
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From the April 13th 2024 edition
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