Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT, issued a warning in January at the World Economic Forum in Davos: the artificial intelligence (AI) industry is about to cause an energy crisis. The new generation of generative AI will consume much more energy than expected, he told the world’s leaders and entrepreneurs, to the point of straining global energy grids. “There’s no way to get there without a breakthrough,” he said curtly.
The breakthrough he was alluding to is the so-called advanced nuclear energy, a term that includes small reactors and nuclear fusion, both still in the experimental phase.