Comment by cdirkx
5 days ago
As a secondary effect it kind of is; the general assumption still is that the slop-generating AI will need a lot of power to train, so there is surprisingly a lot more private investment into fusion and fission innovation in recent years.
Well, AI also has something else for it : at this point, no one is expecting any ROI soon, but they all imagine that it's going to be huuuuge, so the "expected" (as in, "wished for") ROI might as well be infinite.
As soon as AI investors start demanding dividends, then the ROI of investing in AI will be compared to the ROI of investing in electricity production "for production sake".
Even if we shut down chatgpt, people who still switch light on.
If we only keep enough fusion reactors to run LLM inferences, but no one can afford lights, well...