For now, the artificial intelligence tool named Neutron Enterprise is just meant to help workers at the plant navigate extensive technical reports and regulations — millions of pages of intricate documents from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that go back decades — while they operate and maintain the facility. But Neutron Enterprise’s very existence opens the door to further use of AI at Diablo Canyon or other facilities — a possibility that has some lawmakers and AI experts calling for more guardrails.
It depends what purpose that paperwork is intended for.
If the regulatory paperwork it’s managing is designed to influence behaviour, perhaps having an LLM do the work will make it less effective in that regard.
Learning and understanding is hard work. An LLM can’t do that for you.
Sure it can summarise instructions for you to show you what’s more pertinent in a given instance, but is that the same as someone who knows what to do because they’ve been wading around in the logs and regs for the last decade?
It seems like, whether you’re using an LLM to write a business report, or a legal submission, or a SOP for running a nuclear reactor, it can be a great tool but requires high level knowledge on the part of the user to review the output.
As always, there’s a risk that a user just won’t identify a problem in the information produced.
I don’t think this means LLMs should not be used in high risk roles, it just demonstrates the importance of robust policies surrounding their use.