Exploring the Future of AI and Energy Solutions | TSG Ep. 900

Hey, everyone. Did your GPT get smarter? You're watching Textron Gang.

Hi everyone. Happy Tuesday. Welcome to the Text on Gang.

We've got, we, you know, we've got a small gang today, but some goodies here, right down to the, right, down to the core. We've got, uh, Steven Foskett and Mike Azar joining me today on the Gang. And that's really all you need.

Uh, Steven. Mike, welcome. Thanks for coming on.

We, it was a busy, it was a bus. It's been a busy week already. It was a busy weekend.

It was a busy Monday. And here we are on Tuesday. And man, it just seems, you know, one thing we could say about present times is it makes for a lot of good stuff to talk about.

There You go. I don't know if it's good stuff. It makes for a lot of stuff to talk about.

Interesting stuff, controversial stuff and everything else. Um, Mike, let's jump right into it. It was a big weekend where, uh, well actually I think it was last Friday maybe, uh, the, the good folks that shot GPT released five on the world, Right?

But the turmoil through the weekend was rather extensive apparently. So on the plus side, Chad cheap T five is supposed to be smarter, almost PhD level, also b um, seems to be less chantic. So it may actually not, uh, type as much silly stuff in terms of blowing smoke up your skirt as it were, and will not be constantly going, you know, well, aren't you brilliant?

And here's this awesome stuff I found that's not true, but I don't know, it's not true. And then, um, finally though, the thing where there was a bit of a flub is, as I understand it, they decided that the premium edition of Chat, GPT would let you choose between models, but that the standard edition that most people use would force you to use chat GT five. And a lot of people flipped out about that 'cause um, they like GPT-4 and some of the other models.

And so the apparently OpenAI is backtrack a little bit on that, and now giving people more choice in their OpenAI models. But the question I would have, and it seems to me it's like, has open AI kind of, is this mojo starting to slow down? Because I don't know about you guys, but I hear more people using other LLMs and also, um, and the two I hear most often is Claude from philanthropic.

A lot of developers especially like that one and other folks I've talked to, say, you know, it's just fundamentally more accurate. And then other folks are using Gemini simply because it's in their Google Doc and it's the easiest thing to reach out to and connect to, and I don't have to go log into something else. So Alan, I guess, you know, at one point it was like OpenAI chat, GPT was gonna be the dominant, and now they're just one of many.

What's going on in your mind? Well, You know, this is, this is the life of a missionary. And, and I don't mean someone in the jungles, you know, preach or trying to convert people to, to God or something.

But when you, when you, you are the missionary in a given market, right? You're first to market, you are the one who has to have the machete in their hand, you know, slicing through to the, the, the new trail. You're blazing the trail and then someone comes up behind you and just walks a lot easier over that trail that you've already cut.

And so they catch up to you. That being said, look, I'm a chat GPT user and I've been playing with five all weekend. 0 or from four.

But, um, I'll be really honest with you, after using it 10 times, I kind of was looking to go back to four myself. Now I'm a, I am a paid GPT user, but I didn't see the option to go back to fork. I'll check right after we record this today, but I didn't see, 'cause if it's there, I will.

'cause I, I had, well, It wasn't there, It was not there as of last night and, But it is there as of this morning, It is okay, great, because I was, I was a little, I I kind of had it right where I wanted it, you know, and, and then it just slipped outta my fingers. So, uh, now as I say, there is something like I use a prompt to make my prompt better, uh, is my way of using GPT. And it worked really well in four oh and five.

Oh, it, it's just changing my stuff around too much. And I, I don't know, I, I, I could see where it is smarter, but I kind of like four oh better Now. I also dabble in c Claude.

I, I, there are things, Claude is definitely, I think, better in including coding. Um, I don't, I, I'll be, honestly, I don't play as much with Gemini other than when I'm stuck in Google and something's going on. I very rarely, if at all use copilot.

Um, I, you know, I like perplexity for search and for news stories, but I don't, you know, that's as far as that goes. That's kind of where I am. Well, you sound like a plant because what you just said is pretty much what we've heard all weekend, Alan, really, um, uh, from everybody, um, you know, yeah.

0 and, uh, and everybody freaked out because of what you said. Basically everything I had that I set up that seemed to work doesn't work exactly the same. Uh, which is no surprise because, uh, AI models LLMs are non-deterministic.

So, I mean, half the stuff I had set up didn't work from run to run anyway, you know, I mean, you know, you, you, you run it this time and it gives you a good answer. You run it that time and it just did. Well, what are you thinking?

You know, it, but with five, it's different enough that basically everything you had set up, um, in a workflow doesn't quite quite work, right? So yeah, as of, um, last night, I think Altman and, and OpenAI, uh, if you're a paid subscriber, you can go in the settings and you can say show legacy models, and then you can still use four oh, uh, and it's the same four. Oh.

So if you were happy with it, I think you can use it. But you know, like you, um, I I, I, I end up using, I'm a paid open AI user. I use it for summarization a lot.

Um, you know, here's an article, summarize this, here's a transcript from a podcast. What did they talk about? What are the companies they mentioned?

You know, those kind of things. Uh, that's, that's pretty much what I use it for. Um, and frankly, three was fine for that.

Four did a great job. Um, five, I'm not noticing a big increase. And frankly, all of my workflow stuff, like you mentioned, um, all of my automated workflow stuff, I'm using Gemini for simply because it's paid for as part of my subscription, and it does fine.

And so, you know, with Zapier and, and, and, and things like that, you know, I've got out that all running through Gemini and, um, you know, it's cheaper and, and it's okay. It does the thing, you know, whereas the thing in this case again is, is you know, summarize this article, uh, those kind of things, you know, and you know, it's, it's funny, um, you mentioned as well the tone of five. That's what I've been hearing from people.

You know, GPT-4 would say, wow, you've made an amazing discovery. You've learned the secrets of the universe. You might just be the next coming of God.

GPT five is like, yeah, whatever, dude, moving on. Um, and, and, and honestly, I think that's probably better for society. Um, maybe not, maybe people don't like it as much though.

Yeah, No, I, it also is good at suggesting, Hey, I did this for you, you know, this could really use that. And if you like that, let me tell you what else I can maybe conjure up for you. And, and so that is, uh, that is an improvement.

You're right, Steven. And, uh, and it, it is, I I do feel much more like I'm talking to a, a peer rather than a worshiper, you know, if we could call it that. Um, Yeah, somebody said it.

Uh, GPT five sounds like an overworked office mate instead of, uh, instead of a sycophant. So, two things I would like to ask you guys about. One is both of you and myself included, are now using multiple versions of these tools.

Whether we seem to all have at least two, maybe three. Is that how it's gonna play out for most people, or are they gonna lock in on one, or is it gonna be this kind of more, frankly, you know, every app I have is gonna have some sort of LLM built into it, and it's just gonna be a feature. And maybe I don't really care who's LLM I'm using at the moment, unless I happen to know that it's good at a particular thing better than the other ones, such as maybe Claude is for coding Now.

I wish it was that way, but, um, you know, my experience has been that they're not really, um, interchangeable in many ways. In fact, I, I think Gemini does maybe a better job of summarizing than chat GPT. And since summarizing is what I want, then I'm using Gemini.

But you know, I mean, if it, I just wish that they were more predictable and more deterministic. You know, I mean, how sometimes, you know, you throw something at one of these LLMs and it comes back with something just completely off the wall and you're like, do you lose your mind here? Or something?

You know, how did this happen? Well, there's no mind. Um, I guess the statistics just went down the wrong rabbit hole.

Uh, but I don't find them interchangeable quite yet. No, I, I think, you know, I, I, I would, I would analogize this to multi-cloud. Why do people use multiple cloud?

You know, meaning public hyperscaler. You know, why do, why does, why wouldn't you just put everything on AWS or Google or Microsoft? Why do you have a little here, a little there, some here and mostly there?

Well, because each of the clouds, they all have their strengths and weaknesses. They may not be super strengths and super weaknesses, but there are certain things that each of them do a little better than the competition. I think we're gonna see the same thing with ais.

Um, and it really depends, like Steven says, he uses it mostly for summarization, right? Gemini does a great job on summarization. It comes with our Google license pack or whatever they call it.

Um, why not? But if, if for some reason you were using Microsoft and it was, uh, open AI or, uh, copilot, summarizations are relatively baseline type of AI function, you know, I don't know if you'd feel terrible not using Gemini for it, even though it does a little bit of a better job. It's when it does a much better job that you say hook.

I'm doing, you know, coding. Claude does a much better job coding. I'm going to use Claude every time I code.

Although we'll see OpenAI is saying this version is much better at coding. And that will, I don't think we thoroughly, we have not thoroughly tested that whole idea. Steven, one more idea.

Is this an odd, some odd way a victory for the people? Because the people spoke up and open AI and maybe learned a little humility here about the fact that there are people who actually haven't voiced in an opinion about all this stuff. I would be hesitant to attribute humility to OpenAI.

Um, but, but that being said, uh, I do think that maybe OpenAI is at least moderate release, moderately responsible to, or responsive to users. By the way, I remember a similar thing happening previously with, uh, GT three to four transition. And, and you know, where basically users were like, wait, wait, wait.

I still wanna be able to use what works. Can I just please use what works? And, um, I I think that the AI companies are realizing that these models are not interchangeable and that they're gonna need to continue to support it.

Um, yeah, I wouldn't, I wouldn't say, uh, humble, but I would say, uh, at least moderately responsive to user needs. And, and frankly, um, they worked really quickly to, to implement this. That's the other thing I'll say is, you know, they, in, in 48 hours, it went from, we turned it off to it's back on again.

And that's, uh, that's pretty responsive over a weekend. Yeah. Yeah.

They deserve a little bit of a credit for that Be better than the new Coke. Mm-hmm. True That.

And I guess the other thing that people are also dinging them for is the whole rollout of this thing apparently was lacked a certain amount of, uh, shall we say, panache. And, uh, there was, you know, a couple of product managers sitting on a, on a, on a video somewhere, and that was about it. And everybody was kinda like, well, that was pretty ho hum kind of thing.

Or, and, and I can't help but wonder in the future, are we gonna have these kind of product rollouts anymore, or is it just gonna be like, new capabilities will be slip streamed in and maybe we won't be putting numerals behind things. And that's become a little passe, Continuous improvement. DevOps comes to ai.

There you go. Could be, could be. All right.

Let's take a break here. We're gonna come back and, uh, talk about our B block today. What's going on in the data center space.

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Contact us today and tell your story to the world in the most powerful way with Textron Group. Hey folks, we're back. And as Alan alluded, there is this big battle starting to emerge between different states and regions for data centers.

And you see the Southwest now with Arizona and Texas now pretty much becoming destinations for data centers, and they're battling against Virginia and even North Carolina now. And of course, Steven, your, your very own Ohio Valley now has a few data center projects floating around through it as well. And is this gonna become the next big battle?

But, and, and I'm gonna put a little caveat on there. 'cause we've seen now the folks in Tucson decided not to help give the permits for the next data center project. 'cause somebody I guess woke up and said, we don't have the water for this.

But, um, how do you envision all this kind of playing out? Is this gonna be, you know, just money pays for land, or is, or are more people gonna be aware of what's going on? And there will be this so-called NIMBY effect?

Well, you know, right now, um, it's not NIMBYs, it's NIMBYs, right? I mean that people are saying, yes, yes, in my backyard, please build this data center until, until the data center gets built, and then their electric rates go up and their water rates, uh, that go up and their taps run dry and, uh, and they've got pollution like we're hearing in Memphis with X'S data center. Um, yeah, it, it's, it's interesting because it seems right now that there's this, um, crazy race, especially with Virginia and Arizona and other co you know, other states to try to attract these data centers.

Um, and yet there's so much pushback from people. I mean, here in Ohio, for example, our electric rates are starting to go up, not because, uh, the data centers are using more power than we have, but because it's all about the peak. And, and sort of that last, that last watt.

So there's, apparently, there's a public auction process where energy utilities, auction off sort of that, that that little bit of power that you need when everything's really tapped out. And the price of that has gone up by more than 10 x, uh, relative to what it was before the data center boom. So in other words, it's a hot August day and everybody's running their air conditioners, and your local power utility needs to buy just a little bit more to make sure that there's no brownout or anything.

Well, that price is set at auction, and that auction price has gone up to such an extent that it affects the rest of the bill as well, because they have to basically make sure that they've got enough, uh, money set aside that they can also, they can bid against the data centers for that little bit of extra power. So, so here in Ohio, for example, um, the year, you know, most people's electric bills, there was an article the other day that ha ha, most people's electric bills have gone up about $26 a year because of this little tiny little corner case of what if we need a little more power? Well, that's a problem for people who are not making a lot of money, which is why, uh, there's been a little bit of pushback and Columbus and, uh, here in northern Ohio.

Um, and yet, uh, we find out that the mystery buyer that just bought the former GM plan in Lordstown is none other than SoftBank, allegedly to build part of the Stargate data center complex. Now, soft SoftBank is calling everything Star Bank Stargate. Uh, they promised that they were gonna put a half a trillion dollars into building this data center or whatever.

Uh, they don't have that money. Um, so instead what they're doing is open AI's calling everything Stargate SoftBank's calling everything Stargate. It's like, it's like almost as if they're trying to convince someone somewhere that they're actually making the investment they promised.

And I don't, I don't know how that works, but somehow somebody thinks they're investing a lot of money. But the point is, um, the an LLC linked to SoftBank just bought this Lordstown, um, factory that had been intended to build electric vehicles after being the home of the Chevy Volt and, and things like that. They, they were gonna transfer this into a, a Foxconn EV factory.

Well, instead it looks like it's gonna be a data center, which is not so great because data centers don't provide the kind of jobs that people in northeast Ohio had hoped they would get from these, uh, these factories. And, and, and that's sort of the problem right there. So essentially, we're in a situation where, uh, com, you know, the governments are, are competing to attract these data centers.

They're trying to bring these things in for investment purposes for jobs. Sure. But they're not bringing the kind of jobs that people had hoped for.

They're making everybody pay more for utilities. They're, they're affecting people's water. I think there's gonna be a real pushback, especially in places like Virginia, where it's already incredibly built out.

Somebody said the other day that, um, almost 15% of the world's data center capacity is in northern Virginia, um, Arizona, where they don't have a lot of water, uh, for this. And they're gonna have to, you know, try to figure out how they're gonna do that. Texas, same deal.

I mean, you know, Texas isn't the wettest place on earth. Um, some days it is, but only occasionally. That's not, not West Texas where they're building this.

Um, and, and, and so, you know, what are we gonna do? I I think there's gonna be some serious blowback here. And I think some of these politicians that are cutting big red ribbons with great fanfare to attract these data centers are gonna be eating crow in another couple of years when their constituents come back to them and say, wait a second, why is my electric bill so high?

You know, I, I hope I, I hope we were around to do that, right? You know, when you, you know, somewhere, someone somewhere just wants to drill baby Jill, full speed ahead. Damn, the torpedoes.

I used to think when we would see these apo apocalyptic movies like Mad Max and stuff, that that wasteland was created by nuclear wars, who knew it might be created by overbuilding data centers and everything that these data centers need to, to supply us with the AI that we're going to need to tell us what to do after we go to the bathroom. Um, I had, I think that there is a certain aspect of this that does feel like the, going back to the 18 hundreds and the railroad boom, people were selling, you know, land lots on the assumption that, uh, the railroad was, it was coming in to buy all that, only to find out that the railroad went to some other town, and then that town became a ghost town, and everybody lost money on somebody's real estate scam. I feel like a lot of this data center activity has the same vibe to it.

It's, you know, people, Except, let me tell you why it's worse though, Mike, because what we haven't accounted for is what Steven talked about. What is going to be the repercussions? What's the real cost of that data center in terms of clean air, clean, clean water, plentiful water, resources, quality of life?

These data centers don't provide the kinds of jobs that a factory does, and they're increasingly more and more automated, and they increasingly need more and more energy. And, and at a time where we're saying, well, let's not use solar. Let's not use wind.

Come on. Okay, so what are you left with nuclear or, or dirty fossil, right? Or coal heaven for a bit.

You, you keep doing that. You, you know, where, where's the next love canal coming? That's what I'm waiting for.

Are we gonna have love canals again? Because didn't we learn a lesson, you know, runaway industrialization and, and problems? I I don't wanna, you know, I grew up in a time where you couldn't see the mountains in Los Angeles because of smog.

Smog. You know, one of the, one of the few things my generation has done is we, we did make progress against smog and air pollution and water pollution and set aside conservation efforts and stuff like this. Are we just gonna go back on this?

Because under this administration, it's drill, baby drill at all costs. Just make sure we get our share of it. That's not the world.

We are gonna live our leave our children. We need people to stand up and march in the streets against this and say, no, no, no. If it can't be done environmentally, consciously, it shouldn't be done.

And this, this Ohio factor, I think is a really interesting, um, example of that, Alan. 'cause. So Youngstown, where it's Lordstown is just on the outskirts of Youngstown, Ohio, northeast Ohio, near Pennsylvania.

Um, steel built on steel, uh, steel industry went bust. Uh, obviously it was a heavily polluting industry, uh, but it provided tons and tons of jobs. The, the, and the city almost collapsed.

Um, Youngstown is the only one of the only cities ever to reduce its size, literally to, um, bulldoze roads and subdivisions and say, you know what? That we're done with that we're gonna, we're gonna make the city smaller because the population was smaller. Uh, this Lordstown plant was touted as, you know, one of the most advanced automotive factories in, in the, in the world.

Uh, they were building advanced cars there. GM went bust the car factory closed. A lot of jobs were lost.

Foxconn stepped in, you know, and, and Lordstown Motors, one of the greatest Ponzi schemes in automotive history. Google it. Uh, Lordstown Motors came in, you know, they raised a bunch of money.

They got a bunch of tax ab basements. They said, we're gonna build electric pickup trucks in this factory. It's gonna provide a bunch of jobs.

Lordstown, you know, Foxconn stepped in. We're gonna make this a contract manufacturer for EVs. We're gonna build the fisker, uh, cars.

We're gonna build, you know, these Lordstown, uh, pickup trucks that you thought Lordstown was gonna build. And, and of course that didn't work either. Um, and now we're turning it into a data center.

It's gonna have, I don't know, 12 jobs. Isn't that gonna be great? You know, it's, it's just such a symbol of, of what happens as you move from, you know, steel to vehicles, to EVs to contract manufacturing, to data centers, all in one building.

Um, they should rename it the metaphor instead of, you know, the, uh, whatever they're calling it. I agree. Uh, Agreed.

So do you think that these data centers are gonna wind up in more so-called red states than blue states? in the middle of a red state. But, um, you know, is that how it's gonna split?

'cause more folks in the blue states are gonna be worried about these, you know, consequential issues versus other folks are gonna be in the drill baby Joe camp, and we just may have a, a fundamental split of where the data centers wind up as a result. Yep. Yeah.

And, and I would remind people that there's no real red states or blue states. There's just purple states. Um, you know, as somebody who used to live in Massachusetts, I spent the week in Colorado last week.

Um, you know, these, these, you know, the most liberal state is only maybe 10% more liberal. You know, the most conservative state is maybe 10% more conservative. But because of gerrymandering and because of the way politics works, you end up with these radical red governments and blue governments instead of, and, and the people are just like, wait a second.

So I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that the people of Texas and the people of Arizona and the people of, uh, you know, Virginia and Ohio, they're not all that different. And I think they're all gonna be affected by this. And I think there's, there's gonna be a hue and cry.

The difference is that the people in the supposed red states, which are dominated by like Ohio, super majority Republican government, are gonna ram this stuff through without listening to what the people want. Whereas the people in the supposed blue states, which are dominated by, you know, the Democrats are gonna say, hold on. You know, let's think about the environmental repercussions and they're gonna like lose out on this investment.

And, um, and ultimately though, they may have the last laugh because losing out may be the victory when it comes to, uh, data centers. What a revolt and predicament we find ourselves in. It's just boggled, I mean, to say anything.

Yeah. You know, you might be talking about slavery even, right? Some things don't change.

And to, to your point now, even families are fighting about this, right? The Dale Earnhardt's widow is at odds with her stepchildren over land in North Carolina that might be used for a data center. I mean, it could just wind up tearing whole towns apart in the debate, right?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, again, we've seen this here where, um, in my town we were gonna build a solar, uh, generation facility, um, should be non-controversial. We got a bunch of extra land over there.

Let's just put up some solar panels. No problem. It became this big political thing like, oh, I hate solar.

Why do you hate solar? What has it done to you? You know, but, uh, but It becomes political.

I don't get that whole thing, the whole anti-solar wind thing, like, dude, I'm not even going to get into it. Causes cancer, kills birds and all the other b******t. But anyway, let's call a break on this one.

We're actually gonna be continuing the discussion though, 'cause our next block talks about the nuclear option you're watching. com is the leading resource for news analysis and education on challenges facing the cybersecurity industry. com covers all aspects of cybersecurity, including data security, DevSecOps, cloud security, application security, network security, security threats, and more.

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Home of security bloggers network. All right, folks, as Alan hinted, we are gonna talk a little bit more about data centers, but this time in the context of nuclear energy, there's efforts by the Department of Energy work bring with its various labs. Uh, the one in, uh, I think it's Tennessee is Oakridge, is that right?

Um, and they are working with the, some of the subcontractors to determine if they can speed up the process for licensing data centers and infrastructure, especially for use in AI and other high performance computing applications. Alan, have we reached a point now where to our previous thing is that nuclear maybe is the only option? Well, it's not the only option.

It's not the only option. However, I believe in a, a multi-pronged future in terms of energy. I think solar, you know, in spite of what you may hear from our government, solar dollar for dollar might be our best bet today.

Um, wind not far behind. I think the problem we have with nuclear is too many people think of nuclear as the old three mile island or Indian River or, or these kinds of things, right? This ain't 1950s nuclear energy we're talking about.

We're talking about much smaller nuclear plants. Much more efficient, much more safe nuclear capacity. And you wanna know what, when we look at the, our options, there's definitely, I thi and I, look, I, people who know me know this.

I'm, I'm far from a red stater kind of person in general, but when I look at energy, I think nuclear has a place at the table. It's not the only option. But I think today's nuclear and, and when we talk about today's nuclear, it's fission still, right?

Today's nuclear fission, uh, power plants deserve a place in our grids and we can't have it. That it takes a generation to approve licensing for a new nuclear power plant. We've gotta get these things down.

I'm not saying just drill baby drill indiscriminately, turn up nuclear, but you've gotta get these down to a reasonable time without having to jump through all these hoops. I do think it's a lot safer and a lot more efficient than it ever was. I think we also have nuclear fusion on the horizon, you know, and much like, much like, uh, quantum computing, it's always five years off.

But that being said, yeah, Let me use my Linux desktop To check on that. Exactly. But you know it.

But one day it'll be here. We inch closer to it all the time. But until then, nuclear fusion, look, it's not the Chernobyl or, you know, these kinds of things that we could do these in the, the, basically in a shipping container size is from what I understand.

And, and the other thing I will tell you, if you look at the totality of nuclear power use, especially submarines, aircraft carriers, spaceships and energy of generation, the amount of mishaps we've had are, are, are damn near close to no. I mean, there, there's a handful that you could point to in all of these years, and that was all on the oldest technology. Think about all the progress we've made in the last 30 or 40 years since we brought the last nuclear power plant online here in the us.

So, you know, contrary to popular opinion, I am all for this. I applaud the folks at Oak Ridge. Now I'm not saying rush headlong in and just approve everything, right?

But we gotta do something to make it easier to bring nuclear power online. Well, the, right now nuclear power is just stuck in a traffic jam and you can't build anything. I mean, that's, I mean, the biggest problem with nuclear is because it's so intensely not even just regulated, just tied up with paper that you just can't do it.

There's no, you know, and I've, I've ranted against these small modular reactors, number one, because, uh, they're not actually cost competitive. But number two, because you just can't build them because of regulations, uh, they don't even exist because, not because the technology doesn't exist, but because we, we won't let the technology exist. And, and, and so, you know what I'm gonna say, I agree with you on Alan on this.

I wanna see the regulations loosened up and I wanna see us be able to try to work with some new technologies here, some new nuclear technologies. I think it's a good idea. I think these things have dramatically improved.

Uh, they can build these things. I don't know. It looks like they're meltdown proof.

It looks like they're safe. It looks like they're reliable. I think it'd be good.

Ultimately, nuclear is still gonna be costing more than solar plus batteries. But I do think it's better to have all your eggs not in one basket. And I think it would be smart for data centers to have a, um, a small nuclear reactor to help power the data center.

I would love to see solar panels on the roof. I would love to see batteries stabilizing the local grid. Um, I'd love to see them use less water.

But, um, the point is, I think that we need to have some varied sources of energy, like you're saying. And so I do applaud the administration and the folks at Oakridge in looking at ways of cutting some of these, uh, some of the red tape around these things. Because a, as I said, right now, it's just all tied up in red tape and you can't build anything.

Do you guys think, though, that maybe not enough attention is being paid to alternative approaches to rolling out data centers? And now we'll cite, for example, the Chinese are experimenting with dropping data centers in the ocean just to reduce the level of cooling that might be required. Uh, I don't think it's completely solves the energy issue, but, um, there's things that can be done in terms of writing more efficient software.

Maybe we get better processors. But I feel like, uh, right now we're constantly on this notion that says we need, you know, massive amounts of energy today. And then I wonder, you know, six years from now, we're gonna be looking at all these data centers that have no purpose.

'cause we found some better way to do it. Yeah, that's a good point. I mean, are these gonna be the next shopping malls Dotting America, empty big box stores and so on?

I mean, you know, think, yeah. 'cause think about it like, like what you're saying, you know, you can't even sell a previous generation Nvidia, GPU because it is on a power per work basis, not profitable to run it. Uh, what happens when the latest generation GPUs fall into that because the next generation are so much better.

What happens if this whole AI thing, maybe it's the Wizard of Oz and there's nobody behind, you know, there's just a little guy behind the curtain. You know, what if, uh, there the whole AI industry becomes bust? Uh, are the, is this all just gonna be a boondoggle?

It could be, it could be. Let me click my heels three times, and if I wind up with you guys surrounding me in a bed, like I had a bad dream. You Were There too, Mike.

You were there too, Mike. Exactly. Um, look, you know, building a data center under the water, what could go wrong?

There won't hurt the coral or anything, you know? Mm-hmm. Well, Microsoft had a pretty good experiment with that in the Pacific.

I, I, I remember that was a pretty neat experiment. Yeah. Hey, If, if it does go wrong, I got more coral.

Yeah. So Coral Doesn't vote. The the, the thing is, what we're really seeing, and we saw it in the last block and, and it's coming in here again, is a banging of the heads around what we need to do from a modernization progress, if I can call it point of view, versus environmentally conscious and responsible.

And there was a time where those two things were not mutually exclusive, right? We, you know, I don't want to sound like Al Gore, the father of the internet here, but the, you know, he used to preach this kind of thing that you could have your progress and your green too. And I, I would like to see us think along those lines.

It's not all, you know, full speed ahead. Damn, the torpedoes and damn the environment and global climate change, that's certainly not right. Right?

And, and and for us here in the US we have just totally abandoned. I I, I'm not sure if they've outlawed climate change from the federal government's vernacular yet, but they're damn close, right? That's wrong.

That's just so wrong on so many levels. At the same time, we do need more energy. We need cheaper energy.

We need abundant energy and clean and water, but clean water, right? Why can't we work these together again? Why we, dammit, we have ai AI solve this, you Know, it, it, well, you Know, they keep saying that.

They keep saying that AI is gonna give us all these new drugs and solve all these problems for people. Uh, I would love to see them work on that. You and me, both.

You and me both. So, and, and, and to that end, right? Are we focused on the wrong things?

'cause in my mind, maybe we just need a better grid and we need to figure out how the power distribution system needs to work better, because maybe we do have enough power, it's just we can't get it to where We need, we need done batteries. And, and at the same time, to Steven's point earlier, you know, it seems to me, so we have some artificial pricing mechanisms in place that are driving up costs. Well, we, we made those up outta thin air, so maybe we didn't need a different pricing model.

Yeah. Well, and, and just to put some dollar figures on that, I looked it up. Um, nuclear power right now, uh, the levelized cost of energy for nuclear power is anywhere between 27 and $146 per megawatt as compared to solar plus battery, which is 50 to $131 per megawatt.

So nuclear can be as little as half the cost of solar, or as much as almost four times the cost of solar, depending on what regulation, depending on red tape, basically. Yeah. Regulations.

And, and so it's one of those things where we need to start thinking about it a little bit more flexibly. We need to be a little bit more open-minded here. And, um, and, and maybe it could be cost competitive and it could give us a little bit of diversity.

And, and, and, you know, in terms of the grid, having smaller generating sites located more distributed is, is safer. It's more reliable. It doesn't require as big of a grid.

It's, you know, it's greener. Um, it would be good. We'll see.

We shall see. All right. Hey gentlemen, thanks for joining Textron Gang today.

Excellent discussion. Mike, Steven, uh, we'll see you on soon. Thank you for watching Textron Gang today.

As usual, we'll have our Textron tv, uh, line up immediately following. Stay tuned this whole week. We're gonna be, uh, running first time runs a lot of the video work we did over at Black Hat last week, and some good stuff there on cyber and ai, of course, and everything else.

So watch those. But until tomorrow, on behalf of Steven and Mike and myself, have a great day everyone. We're outta here.