Latest news with #TreyLauderdale
TechCrunch
28-05-2025
- Business
- TechCrunch
Atomic Canyon wants to be ChatGPT for the nuclear industry
Tech companies are betting heavily that nuclear power can help deliver the electricity they need to realize their AI plans. But data centers need power tomorrow, and the nuclear industry isn't known for its speed. Trey Lauderdale thinks AI can give nuclear the speed that it needs. Lauderdale's obsession with nuclear started close to home. In San Luis Obispo, California, where he lives, he kept running into people who worked at the Diablo Canyon Power Plant. 'They're like the coaches of our flag football team,' he said. In talking with them, he learned that nuclear power plants are swimming in documents. Diablo Canyon, near Lauderdale's home in San Luis Obispo, has around 2 billion pages worth, he said. Lauderdale, a serial healthcare entrepreneur, had a hunch that AI could help the nuclear industry tame its paper problem. Lauderdale founded Atomic Canyon a little over a year and a half ago, initially funding it with his own money. The startup uses AI to help engineers, maintenance technicians, and compliance officers find the documents they need. The startup landed a deal with Diablo Canyon in late 2024. Lauderdale said the deal led to inquiries from other nuclear power companies. 'That's when I knew, as an entrepreneur, we were at a point where we needed to raise a round of capital.' Atomic Canyon closed a $7 million seed round led by the Energy Impact Partners, the company exclusively told TechCrunch. Participating investors include Commonweal Ventures, Plug and Play Ventures, Tower Research Ventures, Wischoff Ventures, and previous angel investors. Techcrunch event Join us at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot for our leading AI industry event with speakers from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cohere. For a limited time, tickets are just $292 for an entire day of expert talks, workshops, and potent networking. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you've built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | REGISTER NOW When Atomic Canyon first started, its AI engineers tested various models with underwhelming results. 'We quickly realized the AI hallucinates when it sees these nuclear words,' Lauderdale said. 'It hasn't seen enough examples of the acronyms.' But building a new AI model requires massive computing power. So Lauderdale talked his way into a meeting with Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which conducts nuclear research and also happens to have the world's second fastest supercomputer. The lab was intrigued by the idea and awarded Atomic Canyon 20,000 GPU hours worth of compute. Atomic Canyon's models use sentence embedding, which is particularly suited to indexing documents. It tasks them with making a nuclear power plant's documents searchable using retrieval-augmented generation, or RAG. RAG uses large language models to create responses to queries, but it requires the LLMs to refer to specific documents in an effort to reduce hallucination. For now, Atomic Canyon is sticking to document search, in part because the stakes are lower. 'One of the reasons we're starting generative work around the titles of documents is because getting that wrong might cause someone a little frustration. It doesn't put anyone at risk at the plant,' Lauderdale said. Eventually, Lauderdale envisions Atomic Canyon's AI creating 'a first round draft' of documents, complete with references. 'You are always going to have a human in the loop here,' he said. Lauderdale didn't put a timeline on that effort, though. Search is 'the foundational layer,' he said. 'You have to nail the search.' Plus, given the number of documents in the nuclear industry, 'we have a long runway in search alone,' he said.
Yahoo
15-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
California Nuclear Power Plant Deploys Generative AI Safety System
America's first nuclear power plant to use artificial intelligence is, ironically, the last operational one in California. As CalMatters reports, the Diablo Canyon power plant is slated to be decommissioned by the end of this decade. In the interim, the plant's owner, Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), claims that it's deploying its "Neutron Enterprise" tool — which will be the first nuclear plant in the nation to use AI — in a series of escalating stages. Less than 18 months ago, Diablo Canyon was hurtling headlong toward a decommissioning that would have begun in 2024 and ended this year. In late 2023, however, the California Public Utility Commission voted to stay its execution for five years, kicking the can on the inevitable to 2029 and 2030, respectively. Just under a year after that vote, PG&E announced that it was teaming up with a startup called Atomic Canyon, which was founded with the plant in mind and is also based in the coastal Central California town of San Luis Obispo. That partnership, and the first "stage" of the tool's deployment, brought some of Nvidia's high-powered H100 AI chips to the dying nuclear plant, and with them the compute power needed for generative artificial intelligence. Running on an internal server without cloud access, Neutron Enterprise's biggest use case, much like so-called AI "search engines," is summarizing a massive trove of millions of regulatory documents that have been fed into it. According to Atomic Canyon CEO and cofounder Trey Lauderdale, this isn't risky — though anyone who has used AI to summarize information knows better, because the tech still often makes factual mistakes. Speaking to CalMatters, PG&E executive Maureen Zalawick insisted that the AI program will be more of a "copilot" than a "decision-maker," meant to assist flesh-and-blood employees rather than replace them. "We probably spend about 15,000 hours a year searching through our multiple databases and records and procedures," Zalawick explained. "And that's going to shrink that time way down." Lauderdale put it in even simpler terms. "You can put this on the record," he told CalMatters. "The AI guy in nuclear says there is no way in hell I want AI running my nuclear power plant right now." If that "right now" caveat gives you pause, you're not alone. Given the shifting timelines for the closure of Diablo Canyon in a state that has been painstakingly phasing out its nuclear facilities since the 1970s over concerns about toxic waste — and the fact that Lauderdale claims to be talking to other plants in other states — there's ample cause for concern. "The idea that you could just use generative AI for one specific kind of task at the nuclear power plant and then call it a day," cautioned Tamara Kneese of the tech watchdog Data & Society, "I don't really trust that it would stop there." As head of Data & Society's Climate, Technology, and Justice program, Kneese said that while using AI to help sift through tomes of documents is worthwhile, "trusting PG&E to safely use generative AI in a nuclear setting is something that is deserving of more scrutiny." This is the same company whose polluting propensities were exposed by the real-life Erin Brokovich in the 1990s, after all. California lawmakers, meanwhile, were impressed by the tailored usage Atomic Canyon and PG&E propose for the program — but it remains to be seen whether or not that narrow functionality will remain that way. More on AI and energy: Former Google CEO Tells Congress That 99 Percent of All Electricity Will Be Used to Power Superintelligent AI
