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Right, content creators are in a race to the bottom. But the people who position themselves to profit from the energy consumption of the hardware will profit f

Right, content creators are in a race to the bottom. But the people who position themselves to profit from the energy consumption of the hardware will profit from all of it: the LLMs, the image generators, the video generators, etc. See discussion yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41733311 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41733311 Imagine the number of worthless images being generated as people try to find one they like. Slop content creators iterate on a prompt, or maybe create hundreds of video clips hoping to find one that gets views. This is a compute-intensive process that consumes an enormous amount of energy. The market for chips will fragment, margins will shrink. It's just matrix multiplication and the user interface is PyTorch or similar. Nvidia will keep some of its business, Google's TPUs will capture some, other players like Tenstorrent (https://tenstorrent.com/hardware/grayskull https://tenstorrent.com/hardware/grayskull) and Groq and Cerebras will capture some, etc. But at the root of it all is the electricity demand. That's where the money will be made. Data centers need baseload power, preferably clean baseload power. Unless hydro is available, the only clean baseload power source is nuclear fission. As we emerge from the Fukushima bear market where many uranium mining companies went out of business, the bottleneck is the fuel: uranium.

valval 2y ago
You spent a lot of words to conclude that energy is the difference maker between modern western standards of living and whatever else there is and has been.
- atomic128 2y ago
  Ok, too many words. Here's a summary: Trial and error content-creation using generative AI, whether or not it creates any real-world value, consumes a lot of electricity. This electricity demand is likely to translate into demand for nuclear power. When this demand for nuclear power meets the undersupply of uranium post-Fukushima, higher uranium prices will result.
  - defrost 2y ago
    Continuing that thought, higher uranium prices and real demand will lead to unshuttering and exploiting known and proven deposits that are currently idle and increase exploration activity of known resources to advance their status to measured and modelled for economic feasiblity, along with revisiting radiometric maps to flag raw prospects for basic investigation. More supply and lower prices will result. Not unlike the recent few years in (say) lithium, anticipated demand surged exploration and development, actual demand didn't meet anticipated demand and a number of developed economicly feasible resources were shuttered .. still waiting in the wings for a future pickup in demand.
    - atomic128 2y ago
      Spend a few months studying existing demand (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_reactors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...), existing supply (mines in operation, mines in care and maintenance, undeveloped mines), and the time it takes to develop a mine. Once you know the facts we can talk again. Look at how long NexGen's Rook 1 Arrow is taking to develop (https://s28.q4cdn.com/891672792/files/doc_downloads/2022/03/0000-BA00-RPT-0002_2-compressed.pdf https://s28.q4cdn.com/891672792/files/doc_downloads/2022/03/...). Spend an hour listening to what Cameco said in its most recent conference call. Look at Kazatomprom's persistent inability to deliver the promised pounds of uranium, their sulfuric acid shortages and construction delays. Uranium mining is slow and difficult. Existing demand and existing supply are fully visible. There's a gap of 20-40 million pounds per year, with nothing to fill the gap. New mines take a decade or more to develop. It is not in the slightest like lithium.
      - defrost 2y ago
        > Spend a few months studying existing demand Would two decades in global exploration geophysics and being behind the original incarnation of https://www.spglobal.com/market-intelligence/en/industries/metals-mining https://www.spglobal.com/market-intelligence/en/industries/m... count? > Once you know the facts we can talk again. Gosh - that does come across badly.

valval 2y ago

You spent a lot of words to conclude that energy is the difference maker between modern western standards of living and whatever else there is and has been.

atomic128 2y ago
Ok, too many words. Here's a summary: Trial and error content-creation using generative AI, whether or not it creates any real-world value, consumes a lot of electricity. This electricity demand is likely to translate into demand for nuclear power. When this demand for nuclear power meets the undersupply of uranium post-Fukushima, higher uranium prices will result.
- defrost 2y ago
  Continuing that thought, higher uranium prices and real demand will lead to unshuttering and exploiting known and proven deposits that are currently idle and increase exploration activity of known resources to advance their status to measured and modelled for economic feasiblity, along with revisiting radiometric maps to flag raw prospects for basic investigation. More supply and lower prices will result. Not unlike the recent few years in (say) lithium, anticipated demand surged exploration and development, actual demand didn't meet anticipated demand and a number of developed economicly feasible resources were shuttered .. still waiting in the wings for a future pickup in demand.
  - atomic128 2y ago
    Spend a few months studying existing demand (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_reactors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...), existing supply (mines in operation, mines in care and maintenance, undeveloped mines), and the time it takes to develop a mine. Once you know the facts we can talk again. Look at how long NexGen's Rook 1 Arrow is taking to develop (https://s28.q4cdn.com/891672792/files/doc_downloads/2022/03/0000-BA00-RPT-0002_2-compressed.pdf https://s28.q4cdn.com/891672792/files/doc_downloads/2022/03/...). Spend an hour listening to what Cameco said in its most recent conference call. Look at Kazatomprom's persistent inability to deliver the promised pounds of uranium, their sulfuric acid shortages and construction delays. Uranium mining is slow and difficult. Existing demand and existing supply are fully visible. There's a gap of 20-40 million pounds per year, with nothing to fill the gap. New mines take a decade or more to develop. It is not in the slightest like lithium.
    - defrost 2y ago
      > Spend a few months studying existing demand Would two decades in global exploration geophysics and being behind the original incarnation of https://www.spglobal.com/market-intelligence/en/industries/metals-mining https://www.spglobal.com/market-intelligence/en/industries/m... count? > Once you know the facts we can talk again. Gosh - that does come across badly.