We're clearly in an era where the US Govt simply doesn't have enough money to throw at everything it wants to encourage, and needs to develop alternate means of incentivizing (or de-disincentivizing) those things. Sensible minimal regulation is one, there may be others. Time to get creative and resourceful.
Even if they did provide more money, it doesn't mean it'll go to the right place. Government money is not the solution here. Money is already being spent.
Elon gives an unvarnished look at what they mean by 'unbiased' with respect to models. It's rewriting the training material or adding tool use (searching for Musk's tweets about topics before deciding it's output) to twist the output into ideological alignment.
It doesn't say anything about open training corpus of data.
The USA supposedly have the most data in the world. Companies cannot (in theory) train on integrated sets of information. USA and China to some extent, can train on large amounts of information that is not public. USA in particular has been known for keeping a vast repository of metadata (data about data) about all sorts of things. This data is very refined and organized (PRISM, etc).
This allows training for purposes that might not be obvious when observing the open weights or the source of the inference engine.
It is a double-edged sword though. If anyone is able to identify such non-obvious training inserts and extract information about them or prove they were maliciously placed, it could backfire tremendously.
The idea is to dominate AI in the same way that China dominates manufacturing. Even if things are open source that creates a major dependency, especially when the secret sauce is the training content - which is irreversibly hashed away into the weights.
Good to see what? "Encourage" means nothing, every example listed in the document is more exploitative than supportive.
Today, Google and Apple both already sell AI products that technically fall under this definition, and did without government "encouragement" in the mix. There isn't a single actionable thing mentioned that would promote further development of such models.
It's certainly more encouraging than the tone from a few months/ years ago, when there was talk of outright banning open source/ weigh foundational weight models
It’s primarily motivated by control; similar to how all narcissistic, abusive, controlling, murderous, “dominating” (as the document itself proclaims) people and systems are. That is not motivated by magnanimity and genuine shared interest or focus on precision and accuracy.
The controllers of the whole system want open weights and source to make sure models aren’t going to expose the population to unapproved ideas and allow the spread of unapproved thoughts or allow making unapproved connections or ask unapproved questions without them being suitably countered to keep everyone in line with the system.
"major security risks" as in Terminator style robot overlords, or (to me more likely) they enable people to develop exploits more easily? Anyway I fail to see how it makes much difference if the models are open or closed, since the barrier to entry to creating new models is not that large (as in, any competent large company or nation state can do it easily), and even if they were all closed source, anyone who has the weights can run up as many copies as they want.
Obviously AI is a massive and important area for economic growth. But so is clean energy. And both right now are at an inflection point.
It seems the US is going to thrive with the former but naively stick our heads in the sands with the latter.
We’ll cede economic leadership, and wonder in 20 years what happened as other countries lead in energy. Even worse, the administrations stance will encourage US energy companies to pursue bad strategies, letting them avoid transforming their business. In 10-20 years they'll be bankrupt and the US will probably have to bail them out for strategic reasons.
The US is not naively sticking our heads in the sand, our leadership is making direct choices to make sure that they rule over the ashes rather than let a future happen where they have less power.
Overall US Energy production has been expanding, faster, each recent year. https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/. This is all before you factor in the recent attention to Nuclear, which could come online within the next decade.
The ice caps may be worse off for it, but there's little reason to think the USA will cease to "lead in energy" anytime soon.
The US has long since exhausted it's "easy" oil/gas reserves. Yes, there's tons more down there, but it's increasingly hard to get to. Lots of extraction methods only make sense when the price for oil is above some amount.
If the rest of the world standardizes on solar+battery, demand for oil goes down, and so will the price. Which in turn makes US-produced oil not cost effective to extract, and domestic energy production collapses in favor of cheap foreign imports.
And then we're worse off in several different ways.
Increased Mortality: Projections indicate an additional 14.5 million deaths by 2050 due to climate-related impacts like floods, droughts, heatwaves, and climate-sensitive diseases (e.g., malaria and dengue).
Economic Losses: Global economic losses are predicted to reach $12.5 trillion by 2050, with an additional $1.1 trillion burden on healthcare systems due to climate-induced impacts. One study estimates that climate change will cost the global economy $38 trillion a year within the next 25 years.
Displacement and Migration: Over 200 million people may be displaced by climate change by 2050, with an estimated 21.5 million displaced annually since 2008 by weather-related events. In a worst-case scenario, the World Bank suggests this figure could reach 216 million people moving internally due to water scarcity and threats to agricultural livelihoods. Some researchers predict that 1.2 billion people could be displaced by 2050 in the worst-case scenario due to natural disasters and other ecological threats.
Food and Water Insecurity: Climate change exacerbates food and water insecurity, leading to malnutrition and increased disease burden, especially in vulnerable populations. For example, a significant increase in drought in certain regions could cause 3.2 million deaths from malnutrition by 2050. An estimated 183 million additional people could go hungry by 2050, even if warming is held below 1.6°C.
Mental Health Impacts: Climate change contributes to mental health issues like anxiety, depression, and PTSD, particularly in vulnerable populations and those experiencing climate disasters or chronic changes like drought. Extreme heat has been linked to increased aggression and suicide risk. Studies also indicate that children born today will experience a significantly higher number of climate extremes than previous generations, potentially impacting their mental well-being and sense of future security.
Inequality and Vulnerability: Climate change disproportionately affects vulnerable populations, including low-income individuals, people of color, outdoor workers, and those with existing health conditions, worsening existing health inequities and hindering poverty reduction efforts.
I specifically refer to the question of who will own the IP and economic might to lead in the clean energy market. Who will innovate? Who will build industrial capacity and know how, etc. It seems we’ve ceded the field
Not just strict energy production. Especially when it comes from sources of energy increasingly infeasible and unpopular.
Everything I've read recently has emphasized that new nuclear installations will have difficulty competing with solar and storage.
Having a non-emitting form of base load is important, and nuclear has a place there, but it many applications it's just not cost competitive with renewables.
Nuclear power plants certainly have their place, but this is overstating things. If you take the total costs involved in building and operating a nuclear power plant over its lifetime and divide it by the energy produced, you still end up spending a decent chunk of change.
Nuclear takes 20 years to build and plants cost $10B.
Rooftop solar starts paying back instantly and can be deployed in $20k tranches. It also requires no additional grid infrastructure and decreases demand on non generating grid infrastructure.
Pretty sure it’s rooftop solar that wins the future.
I really don't understand HN's love affair with nuclear.
Uranium mining produces significant toxic waste (tailings and raffinates). Fuel processing produces toxic waste, typically UF6. There is some processing of UF6 to UF4 but that doesn't solve the problem and it's not economic anyway. Fuel usage produces even more waste that typically needs to be actively cooled for years or decades before it can be forgotten about in a cave (as nuclear advocates argue).
And then who is going to operate the plant? This administration in particular is pushing for further nuclear deregulation, which is terrifying. You want to see what happens without regulation? Elon Musk's gas turbines in South Memphis with no Clean Air permits that are spewing pollution [1].
That's terrifying because the failure modes for a single nuclear incident are orders of magnitude worse than any other form of power plant. The cleanup from Fukushima requires technologies that don't exist yet, will take decades or centuries and will likely cost ~$1 trillion once its over, if it ever is [2].
And who's going to pay for that? It's not going to be the private operator. In fact, in the US there's laws that limit liability for nuclear accidents. The industry's self-insurance fund would be exhausted many times over by a single Fukushima incident.
And then we get to the hand waving about Chernobyl, Fukushima and Three Mise Island. "Those are old designs", "the new designs are immune to catastrophic failure" or, my favorite, "Chernobyl was because of mismanagement in the USSR" like there wouldn't be corner-cutting by any private operator in the US.
And let's just gloss over the fact that we've built fewer than 700 nuclear power plants, yet had 3 major incidents, 2 of them (Chernobyl and Fukushima) have had massive negative impacts. The Chernobyl absolute exclusion zone is still 1000 square miles. But anything negative is an outlier that should be ignored, apparently.
And then we get to the impact of carbon emissions in climate change but now we're comparing the entire fossil fuel power industry vs one nuclear plant. It's also a false dichotomy. The future is hydro and solar.
and then we get to the massive boondoggle of nuclear fusion, which I'm not convinced will ever be commercially viable. Energy loss and container destruction from fast neutrons is a fundamental problem that stars don't have because they have gravity and are incredibly large.
I have no idea where this blind faith in nuclear comes from.
You obviously have no idea how much destruction it causes to the environment to get the uranium out of the earth. Maybe educate yourself before putting such nonsense into the world.
It's part of the current administration's energy agenda, President Trump signed executive orders a couple of months ago, to increase nuclear energy capacity by 400% in the next 25 years, revising regulations, and expediting review and approval of reactor projects, which seems like the most effective strategy for expanding clean energy production.
A certain group of people keep saying that. But that particular idea of "clean" nuclear does not price in the 10.000 years of safe storage of nuclear waste materials (for the most dangerous HLW materials this number can go up to 100.000 years). Do you and your 3500 generations of ancestors volunteer to do this? Then it is cheap and clean. Otherwise it is yet another instance of "privatize the gains and socialize the externalities".
(And let's ignore the fact that humanity barely managed to organize anything that held even a mere 1000 years)
Trump has signed a number of bills aimed at ramping up the nuclear center, which is the best-available renewable energy source based on current tech, aside from geothermal, assuming recent developments continue to pan out.
The only country that the US needs to worry about beating them in the clean energy race is China. They’re building energy plants like crazy (though worth noting, not all of their plants are clean energy).
> wonder in 20 years what happened as other countries lead in energy
Can you clarify what leading in energy means? And what concerns do you have?
Do you mean we, in the U.S. are in a tarpit of regulations and red tape that makes setting up a nuclear power plant up impossible? Or something else?
IMHO, leading in energy also needs to take into account where that energy takes us and what it unlocks. I immigrated to the U.S. so I am extremely bullish so do consider that below.
My California perspective is that energy is going to be even more decentralized. I have not paid an electric bill in years and get a check from my utility once a year where they pay me wholesale rates for my net export. I net export because I rarely use any meaningful energy at night that my 5kwH battery pack cannot provide. Once battery prices fall even further, I will dump everything into my local storage and draw no gross power from my utility at all. For all practical purposes, I will be off grid.
Anyone in California has the technological ability to get there as well. The utilities dump GWh of solar energy because we produce so much!
The issue we have in the U.S. is one of horrible policies and regulation.
Your typical townhouse in the city block isn't going to be able to put 20 panels on their roof because their HOA is going to throw a fit. The owner won't be allowed to install it themselves and would have to pay an electrician tens of thousands of dollars because the city isn't going to permit it otherwise. The obstacle of installing $5k worth of parts is incredibly disappointing.
From my perspective, technologically, solar energy is going to become cheaper as storage continues to fall in price.
This will empower increasing productivity. In my case, once the GPU market becomes consumer friendly and less constrained, or fundamentally different LLMs are released that are CPU friendly but I can't imagine that possibility yet, I will buy more GPUs and increase my self host LLM capacity. Today, as of right now I an getting "Insufficient capacity" errors from AWS attempting to launch a g6.2xlarge cluster and puny 24GB GPUs cost a lot making renting from AWS a better choice. The responses from the coding models blow my mind. They often meet or beat the kind of code I would expect from a junior engineer I would have to pay $120k/yr for and that would be a cheap engineer in SoCal. A GPU cluster including running costs would be fraction of that so I would be able to expand quicker with less.
Whole offices are going to become more compact and continue to become decentralized or even remote. Their carbon footprint is then going to go practically zero (no office security patrol, no HVAC, no heating, etc). More people will be able to start businesses (higher GDP) with less, increasing the GDP per Co2 emissions.
My childhood friends in the E.U who are in the same space that I am in are less enthusiastic. My friends in Germany who bought a hundred PV panels is not happy at all.
So which country will lead in energy and what would they be doing?
People love using their pet issue as the sole explanation for why something did or didn't happen. It's never that simple.
My boomer boss thinks writing tests is unnecessary and slows shipping down. It might be true, but it fails to appreciate the full scope of the problem.
The most important thing here IMHO is the strong stance taken towards open source and open weight AI models. This stance puts the US government at odds with some other regulatory initiatives like the EU AI Act (which doesn't outlaw open weight models and does have some exemptions below 10²⁵ FLOPS, but still places a fairly daunting regulatory burden on decentralized open projects).
IMHO it's not empty talk; a lot of the elements of the plan reinforce each other. For example, it's pretty clear that state initiatives that were aiming to place regulatory thresholds like the 10^26 FLOPS limit in Calfornia's SB1047 are going to be targets under this plan, and US diplomatic participation in initiatives like the Council of Europe AI treaty are now on the chopping block. There are obviously competing perspectives emerging globally on regulation of AI, and this plan quite clearly aims to foster one particular side. It doesn't appear to be hot air.
For open source/open weight models it's particularly important because until now there wasn't a government-level strong voice countering people like Geoff Hinton's call to ban open source/open weight AI, like he articulates here: https://thelogic.co/news/ai-cant-be-slowed-down-hinton-says-...
I don't know if this counts as amazing optimism or just straight up blinders if that's your takeaway compared to the emphasis placed on non-renewable energy and government enforced ideology.
How much land mass would need to be covered by solar panels to power this future AI infrastructure. Yes, I'm implying that solar would be impractical, but I'm also genuinely curious.
Your implication is misguided, solar is in fact the most practical way to add more electricity for most countries.
The US generated an additional 64Twh of solar in 2024 compared to 2023. To get the same amount from nuclear you would need to build 5 large reactors in one year.
As for land mass, we can re-use already spent land mass, like rooftops, parking lots, grazing farmland and such. Solar can also be placed on lakes.
So for the foreseeable future there is no actual need for new land to be dedicated to solar.
Even though I think solar is impractical as a primary source for various reasons, it doesn't take a lot.
David MacKay in "Sustainable Energy: Without the Hot Air" did a calculation circa 2010. To fulfill the world's energy needs back then, a 10 km^2 area in the Sahara desert would be sufficient. Even if you scaled that to 100 km^2, it's absolutely tiny on a global scale, and panels have only become more efficient since then.
The challenge of course is storage and distribution, but yeah, in terms of land area, it's not much.
3,000-4,000 acres per GW of production capacity in the US Southwest. According to AI :)
Considering how little use there is for most of that land anyways, it seems like a good option to me.
Also AI training seems like the perfect fit for solar. Run it when the sun is shining. Inference is significantly less power hungry, so it can run base load 24/7.
it needs to be better connected over larger distances i guess.
Some 'sunny' countries around the equator are working on it. laying gridlines to other less sunny places and trying to offer solar to reduce carbon taxes or whatever.
i know Saudi, Morocco and China are all massively dumping panels into their deserts, likely more places too. these are great places to put them as it has less impact on environment (less wildlife etc.) and it's pretty much always sunny during the daytime, so it's high efficient per m/2 comparted to colder more cloudy places.
Morocco already is connected for energy providing to Europe via Spain afaik, though i think that is currently not used yet, so they are in a good position to leverage that as power demands surge across EU datacenters trying to compete in AI :'D (absolutely no clue if they will actually go that route but it seems logical!)
That's interesting - I would generally like to use something like Cluade Code heavily during work hours and sparsely otherwise. Plus I assume most LLM-for-knowledge-work-at-industrial-scale demand will be similar as these datacentres are built out.
America has a few time zones to move the peaks around in a little bit. The world has plenty. Luckily AI power consumption doesn't have to be located where the consumer is.
As we build out solar, daytime power will become cheaper than nighttime power.
Some people will eventually find it economical to time-shift their consumption to daytime hours, including saving any non-interactive computation for those hours, and shutting down unneeded compute at night.
"Counter Chinese Influence in International Governance Bodies" and grouping them in with US "adversaries" and "rivals" is quite undiplomatic language to throw in under "Lead in International AI Diplomacy and Security" section. Diplomacy with China should be an important part of this initiative but will inevitably be bungled.
Even if it’s not perfect, I’m happy to see there’s a focus on AI Security. NIST has been a reliable producer of quality international standards for cybersecurity. Hopefully this action plan will lead to similarly high quality recommendations for AI Security.
China is an adversary of the West, and leading in international security means posing a challenge (or, in an ideal world, a better alternative) to Chinese influence on the international stage.
I've seen several European initiatives similar to this before, and the same question is always asked: what does this actually do?
People (at least on HN) seem to be in agreement the Europe is too regulatory and bureaucratic, so it feels fair to question the practicality of any American initiatives, as we do for European ones.
What does this document practically enact today? Is there any actual money allocated? Deregulation seems to be a theme, so are there any examples of regulations which have been cleansed already? How about planning? This document is full of directives and the names of federal agencies which plan to direct, so what are the actual results of said plans that we can see today and in the coming years?
I, for one, dont't agree with the idea that Europe is too regulatory and bureaucratic. I welcome my rights as a consumer and human being being safeguarded at the cost of a small amount of profit.
Registering a company in Germany: you must visit a notary in person with your incorporation documents, and sit there while the notary reads aloud your incorporation to you. This is to "ensure that you fully understand the contract" even as a foreigner who doesn't speak corporate-legalese-German. Minimum capital deposit of €25,000.
Registering a company in US (Delaware) can be achieved in as little as 1 hour.
Getting married in Germany, particularly between a German and a foreigner, is anything from a 6 month to 2 year process, involving significant expenses, notarization/translation of documents. Some documents expire after 6 months, so if the government bureaucrats are too slow you need to get new copies, translated again, notarized again, and try to re-submit.
This isn't protecting human rights, it's supporting a class of bureaucrats/notaries/translators/clerks and making life more difficult for ordinary people. It's also a form of light racism that targets foreigners/migrants by imposing more difficult bureaucratic requirements and costs on them compared to by birth citizens.
Removing Red Tape and Onerous Regulation
Ensure that Frontier AI Protects Free Speech and American Values
Encourage Open-Source and Open-Weight AI
Enable AI Adoption
Empower American Workers in the Age of AI
Support Next-Generation Manufacturing
Invest in AI-Enabled Science
Build World-Class Scientific Datasets
Advance the Science of AI 9
Invest in AI Interpretability, Control, and Robustness Breakthroughs
Build an AI Evaluations Ecosystem
Accelerate AI Adoption in Government
Drive Adoption of AI within the Department of Defense
Protect Commercial and Government AI Innovations
Combat Synthetic Media in the Legal System
I can’t take this seriously, as recent actions by this administration directly contradicts a few of these stated goals.
Or maybe I don’t want to, because this sounds dangerous to me at this time.
> Removing Red Tape and Onerous Regulation Ensure that Frontier AI Protects Free Speech
Yet at the same time,
> Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government [...] LLMs shall be neutral, nonpartisan tools that do not manipulate responses in favor of ideological dogmas such as DEI. [...] DEI includes the suppression or distortion of factual information about race or sex; manipulation of racial or sexual representation in model outputs; incorporation of concepts like critical race theory, transgenderism, unconscious bias, intersectionality, and systemic racism; and discrimination on the basis of race or sex. [1]
I don't understand how free speech can be protected while suppressing topics such as "unconscious bias" and "discrimination".
most of these are vibe signaling, like Communist Party of China has been doing in past year, except this won't work as effective here as in China, not even close, because the US is not authoritarian enough to mobilize every level of the govt and the economy by just empty propaganda slogans.
>this won't work as effective here as in China, not even close, because the US is not authoritarian enough to mobilize every level of the govt and the economy by just empty propaganda slogans.
Have you been under a rock for the last 6 months as Trump tells Xi Jinping to hold his beer??
> Update Federal procurement guidelines to ensure that the government only contracts with frontier large language model (LLM) developers who ensure that their systems are objective and free from top-down ideological bias
If foundation model companies want their government contracts renewed, they are going to have to make sure their AI output aligns with this administration's version of "truth".
> I already am eating from the trashcan all the time. The name of this trashcan is ideology. The material force of ideology - makes me not see what I'm effectively eating. It's not only our reality which enslaves us. The tragedy of our predicament - when we are within ideology, is that - when we think that we escape it into our dreams - at that point we are within ideology.
> In the AI context, DEI includes the suppression or distortion of factual information about race or sex; manipulation of racial or sexual representation in model outputs; incorporation of concepts like critical race theory, transgenderism, unconscious bias, intersectionality, and systemic racism; and discrimination on the basis of race or sex. DEI displaces the commitment to truth in favor of preferred outcomes and, as recent history illustrates, poses an existential threat to reliable AI.
> incorporation of concepts like critical race theory, transgenderism, unconscious bias, intersectionality, and systemic racism
So... the concept of unconscious bias is verboten to the new regime? Isn't it just a pretty simple truth? We all have unconscious biases because we all work with incomplete information. Isn't this just a normal idea?
There will be several executive orders dictating chatbot truths. The first order will be that Trump won the 2020 election, the others will be a series of other North Korea-esque nonsense MAGA loves. America the excellent!
Readit News
It's good to see this, especially since they acknowledge that open weights is not equal to open source.
In fact, if you open the PDF file and navigate to that section, the content is barely relevant at all.
The USA supposedly have the most data in the world. Companies cannot (in theory) train on integrated sets of information. USA and China to some extent, can train on large amounts of information that is not public. USA in particular has been known for keeping a vast repository of metadata (data about data) about all sorts of things. This data is very refined and organized (PRISM, etc).
This allows training for purposes that might not be obvious when observing the open weights or the source of the inference engine.
It is a double-edged sword though. If anyone is able to identify such non-obvious training inserts and extract information about them or prove they were maliciously placed, it could backfire tremendously.
Today, Google and Apple both already sell AI products that technically fall under this definition, and did without government "encouragement" in the mix. There isn't a single actionable thing mentioned that would promote further development of such models.
The controllers of the whole system want open weights and source to make sure models aren’t going to expose the population to unapproved ideas and allow the spread of unapproved thoughts or allow making unapproved connections or ask unapproved questions without them being suitably countered to keep everyone in line with the system.
It seems the US is going to thrive with the former but naively stick our heads in the sands with the latter.
We’ll cede economic leadership, and wonder in 20 years what happened as other countries lead in energy. Even worse, the administrations stance will encourage US energy companies to pursue bad strategies, letting them avoid transforming their business. In 10-20 years they'll be bankrupt and the US will probably have to bail them out for strategic reasons.
The ice caps may be worse off for it, but there's little reason to think the USA will cease to "lead in energy" anytime soon.
If the rest of the world standardizes on solar+battery, demand for oil goes down, and so will the price. Which in turn makes US-produced oil not cost effective to extract, and domestic energy production collapses in favor of cheap foreign imports.
And then we're worse off in several different ways.
Increased Mortality: Projections indicate an additional 14.5 million deaths by 2050 due to climate-related impacts like floods, droughts, heatwaves, and climate-sensitive diseases (e.g., malaria and dengue).
Economic Losses: Global economic losses are predicted to reach $12.5 trillion by 2050, with an additional $1.1 trillion burden on healthcare systems due to climate-induced impacts. One study estimates that climate change will cost the global economy $38 trillion a year within the next 25 years.
Displacement and Migration: Over 200 million people may be displaced by climate change by 2050, with an estimated 21.5 million displaced annually since 2008 by weather-related events. In a worst-case scenario, the World Bank suggests this figure could reach 216 million people moving internally due to water scarcity and threats to agricultural livelihoods. Some researchers predict that 1.2 billion people could be displaced by 2050 in the worst-case scenario due to natural disasters and other ecological threats.
Food and Water Insecurity: Climate change exacerbates food and water insecurity, leading to malnutrition and increased disease burden, especially in vulnerable populations. For example, a significant increase in drought in certain regions could cause 3.2 million deaths from malnutrition by 2050. An estimated 183 million additional people could go hungry by 2050, even if warming is held below 1.6°C.
Mental Health Impacts: Climate change contributes to mental health issues like anxiety, depression, and PTSD, particularly in vulnerable populations and those experiencing climate disasters or chronic changes like drought. Extreme heat has been linked to increased aggression and suicide risk. Studies also indicate that children born today will experience a significantly higher number of climate extremes than previous generations, potentially impacting their mental well-being and sense of future security.
Inequality and Vulnerability: Climate change disproportionately affects vulnerable populations, including low-income individuals, people of color, outdoor workers, and those with existing health conditions, worsening existing health inequities and hindering poverty reduction efforts.
Not just strict energy production. Especially when it comes from sources of energy increasingly infeasible and unpopular.
Having a non-emitting form of base load is important, and nuclear has a place there, but it many applications it's just not cost competitive with renewables.
Rooftop solar starts paying back instantly and can be deployed in $20k tranches. It also requires no additional grid infrastructure and decreases demand on non generating grid infrastructure.
Pretty sure it’s rooftop solar that wins the future.
Maybe if fusion was viable, that'll change, but until then nuclear just doesn't make any sense.
Uranium mining produces significant toxic waste (tailings and raffinates). Fuel processing produces toxic waste, typically UF6. There is some processing of UF6 to UF4 but that doesn't solve the problem and it's not economic anyway. Fuel usage produces even more waste that typically needs to be actively cooled for years or decades before it can be forgotten about in a cave (as nuclear advocates argue).
And then who is going to operate the plant? This administration in particular is pushing for further nuclear deregulation, which is terrifying. You want to see what happens without regulation? Elon Musk's gas turbines in South Memphis with no Clean Air permits that are spewing pollution [1].
That's terrifying because the failure modes for a single nuclear incident are orders of magnitude worse than any other form of power plant. The cleanup from Fukushima requires technologies that don't exist yet, will take decades or centuries and will likely cost ~$1 trillion once its over, if it ever is [2].
And who's going to pay for that? It's not going to be the private operator. In fact, in the US there's laws that limit liability for nuclear accidents. The industry's self-insurance fund would be exhausted many times over by a single Fukushima incident.
And then we get to the hand waving about Chernobyl, Fukushima and Three Mise Island. "Those are old designs", "the new designs are immune to catastrophic failure" or, my favorite, "Chernobyl was because of mismanagement in the USSR" like there wouldn't be corner-cutting by any private operator in the US.
And let's just gloss over the fact that we've built fewer than 700 nuclear power plants, yet had 3 major incidents, 2 of them (Chernobyl and Fukushima) have had massive negative impacts. The Chernobyl absolute exclusion zone is still 1000 square miles. But anything negative is an outlier that should be ignored, apparently.
And then we get to the impact of carbon emissions in climate change but now we're comparing the entire fossil fuel power industry vs one nuclear plant. It's also a false dichotomy. The future is hydro and solar.
and then we get to the massive boondoggle of nuclear fusion, which I'm not convinced will ever be commercially viable. Energy loss and container destruction from fast neutrons is a fundamental problem that stars don't have because they have gravity and are incredibly large.
I have no idea where this blind faith in nuclear comes from.
[1]: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/06/elon-musk-xai-memph...
[2]: https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/16/fukushimas-final-costs-...
Is it? Sure it helps sell chips, but where is it actually driving measurable efficiency improvements?
(And let's ignore the fact that humanity barely managed to organize anything that held even a mere 1000 years)
The only country that the US needs to worry about beating them in the clean energy race is China. They’re building energy plants like crazy (though worth noting, not all of their plants are clean energy).
Can you clarify what leading in energy means? And what concerns do you have?
Do you mean we, in the U.S. are in a tarpit of regulations and red tape that makes setting up a nuclear power plant up impossible? Or something else?
IMHO, leading in energy also needs to take into account where that energy takes us and what it unlocks. I immigrated to the U.S. so I am extremely bullish so do consider that below.
My California perspective is that energy is going to be even more decentralized. I have not paid an electric bill in years and get a check from my utility once a year where they pay me wholesale rates for my net export. I net export because I rarely use any meaningful energy at night that my 5kwH battery pack cannot provide. Once battery prices fall even further, I will dump everything into my local storage and draw no gross power from my utility at all. For all practical purposes, I will be off grid.
Anyone in California has the technological ability to get there as well. The utilities dump GWh of solar energy because we produce so much!
The issue we have in the U.S. is one of horrible policies and regulation.
Your typical townhouse in the city block isn't going to be able to put 20 panels on their roof because their HOA is going to throw a fit. The owner won't be allowed to install it themselves and would have to pay an electrician tens of thousands of dollars because the city isn't going to permit it otherwise. The obstacle of installing $5k worth of parts is incredibly disappointing.
From my perspective, technologically, solar energy is going to become cheaper as storage continues to fall in price.
This will empower increasing productivity. In my case, once the GPU market becomes consumer friendly and less constrained, or fundamentally different LLMs are released that are CPU friendly but I can't imagine that possibility yet, I will buy more GPUs and increase my self host LLM capacity. Today, as of right now I an getting "Insufficient capacity" errors from AWS attempting to launch a g6.2xlarge cluster and puny 24GB GPUs cost a lot making renting from AWS a better choice. The responses from the coding models blow my mind. They often meet or beat the kind of code I would expect from a junior engineer I would have to pay $120k/yr for and that would be a cheap engineer in SoCal. A GPU cluster including running costs would be fraction of that so I would be able to expand quicker with less.
Whole offices are going to become more compact and continue to become decentralized or even remote. Their carbon footprint is then going to go practically zero (no office security patrol, no HVAC, no heating, etc). More people will be able to start businesses (higher GDP) with less, increasing the GDP per Co2 emissions.
My childhood friends in the E.U who are in the same space that I am in are less enthusiastic. My friends in Germany who bought a hundred PV panels is not happy at all.
So which country will lead in energy and what would they be doing?
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My boomer boss thinks writing tests is unnecessary and slows shipping down. It might be true, but it fails to appreciate the full scope of the problem.
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For open source/open weight models it's particularly important because until now there wasn't a government-level strong voice countering people like Geoff Hinton's call to ban open source/open weight AI, like he articulates here: https://thelogic.co/news/ai-cant-be-slowed-down-hinton-says-...
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The US generated an additional 64Twh of solar in 2024 compared to 2023. To get the same amount from nuclear you would need to build 5 large reactors in one year.
As for land mass, we can re-use already spent land mass, like rooftops, parking lots, grazing farmland and such. Solar can also be placed on lakes.
So for the foreseeable future there is no actual need for new land to be dedicated to solar.
Solar: ~300-800 L/MWh [0]
Nuclear: ~3000 L/MWh [1]
0: https://iea-pvps.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Water_Footpr...
1: https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/P1569_web.pdf
David MacKay in "Sustainable Energy: Without the Hot Air" did a calculation circa 2010. To fulfill the world's energy needs back then, a 10 km^2 area in the Sahara desert would be sufficient. Even if you scaled that to 100 km^2, it's absolutely tiny on a global scale, and panels have only become more efficient since then.
The challenge of course is storage and distribution, but yeah, in terms of land area, it's not much.
Considering how little use there is for most of that land anyways, it seems like a good option to me.
Also AI training seems like the perfect fit for solar. Run it when the sun is shining. Inference is significantly less power hungry, so it can run base load 24/7.
Probably zero agricultural if you mandate all rooftops to be solar. And all parking lots to be covered with solar roofs.
Solar is great for rooftops of houses, it’s not really great to run a DC 24/7 without batteries.
i know Saudi, Morocco and China are all massively dumping panels into their deserts, likely more places too. these are great places to put them as it has less impact on environment (less wildlife etc.) and it's pretty much always sunny during the daytime, so it's high efficient per m/2 comparted to colder more cloudy places.
Morocco already is connected for energy providing to Europe via Spain afaik, though i think that is currently not used yet, so they are in a good position to leverage that as power demands surge across EU datacenters trying to compete in AI :'D (absolutely no clue if they will actually go that route but it seems logical!)
If you want the PD companies to have a different blend, then they need carrots and sticks.
As we build out solar, daytime power will become cheaper than nighttime power.
Some people will eventually find it economical to time-shift their consumption to daytime hours, including saving any non-interactive computation for those hours, and shutting down unneeded compute at night.
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People (at least on HN) seem to be in agreement the Europe is too regulatory and bureaucratic, so it feels fair to question the practicality of any American initiatives, as we do for European ones.
What does this document practically enact today? Is there any actual money allocated? Deregulation seems to be a theme, so are there any examples of regulations which have been cleansed already? How about planning? This document is full of directives and the names of federal agencies which plan to direct, so what are the actual results of said plans that we can see today and in the coming years?
Registering a company in US (Delaware) can be achieved in as little as 1 hour.
Getting married in Germany, particularly between a German and a foreigner, is anything from a 6 month to 2 year process, involving significant expenses, notarization/translation of documents. Some documents expire after 6 months, so if the government bureaucrats are too slow you need to get new copies, translated again, notarized again, and try to re-submit.
This isn't protecting human rights, it's supporting a class of bureaucrats/notaries/translators/clerks and making life more difficult for ordinary people. It's also a form of light racism that targets foreigners/migrants by imposing more difficult bureaucratic requirements and costs on them compared to by birth citizens.
I can’t take this seriously, as recent actions by this administration directly contradicts a few of these stated goals.
Or maybe I don’t want to, because this sounds dangerous to me at this time.
What red tape? Anyone can buy/rent a GPU(s) and train stuff.
Well previously the Chinese were not able to, but that was changed recently:
* https://www.wsj.com/tech/nvidia-wins-ok-to-resume-sales-of-a...
* https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/07/22/nvidia-chip-deal-us-chi...
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Yet at the same time,
> Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government [...] LLMs shall be neutral, nonpartisan tools that do not manipulate responses in favor of ideological dogmas such as DEI. [...] DEI includes the suppression or distortion of factual information about race or sex; manipulation of racial or sexual representation in model outputs; incorporation of concepts like critical race theory, transgenderism, unconscious bias, intersectionality, and systemic racism; and discrimination on the basis of race or sex. [1]
I don't understand how free speech can be protected while suppressing topics such as "unconscious bias" and "discrimination".
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/07/prev...
[1]: https://theconversation.com/how-do-you-stop-an-ai-model-turn...
[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/may/14/elon-musk...
[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jul/09/grok-ai-p...
Anyone serious knows contradiction = lies.
Words are cheap, actions matter.
Have you been under a rock for the last 6 months as Trump tells Xi Jinping to hold his beer??
If foundation model companies want their government contracts renewed, they are going to have to make sure their AI output aligns with this administration's version of "truth".
This phrasing exactly corresponds to "politically correct" in its original meaning.
> I already am eating from the trashcan all the time. The name of this trashcan is ideology. The material force of ideology - makes me not see what I'm effectively eating. It's not only our reality which enslaves us. The tragedy of our predicament - when we are within ideology, is that - when we think that we escape it into our dreams - at that point we are within ideology.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVwKjGbz60k
So like making sure everyone knows that 2+2=5 and that we have always been at war with East Asia?
> In the AI context, DEI includes the suppression or distortion of factual information about race or sex; manipulation of racial or sexual representation in model outputs; incorporation of concepts like critical race theory, transgenderism, unconscious bias, intersectionality, and systemic racism; and discrimination on the basis of race or sex. DEI displaces the commitment to truth in favor of preferred outcomes and, as recent history illustrates, poses an existential threat to reliable AI.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/07/prev...
So... the concept of unconscious bias is verboten to the new regime? Isn't it just a pretty simple truth? We all have unconscious biases because we all work with incomplete information. Isn't this just a normal idea?
Let's see how that shakes out in this particular case.
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