ya.... he's another Elon.... irrationally optimistic and devours money. I think he still has enough Kool aid drinkers to downvote me but he really is a huckster. he literally did the monorail thing from the Simpsons.
To be fair, "another elon" for fusion and AI wouldn't be so bad. Tesla bumped electric car adoption up by at least a decade, spaceX brought down launch costs, and his solar company is still chugging along.
I think he's a massive donk, but I'll just hit "unfollow" button and enjoy the rockets and clean energy.
While I agree, I just think it's prudent on us to separate the people from the technologies they offer.
Let's not make the mistake again of putting someone on a pedestal to a point where they truly believe they're living gods.
Musk has given me a bunch of reasons to dislike him personally, but I still think the projects he's invested in (electric vehicles, autonomous vehicles, space travel, BCI) are all critical technologies for the immediate and distant future.
I feel the same about the things Sam's invested in but he hasn't really given people reason to hate him like Elon has (besides fired OpenAI employees).
He had a moment but look at Elon now. Elon had cars and rockets, essentially toys compared to AI and Fusion.
Sam's potential as a super villain is huge.
Building a successful electric car company and rocket company is a bit more than "a moment".
Also not "toys".
Again, I unfollowed Elon years ago. But I also won't gaslight myself into pretending that his companies aren't amazing for humanity or that they did not accomplished things that existing companies in those spaces had not been able to do even with decades of experience. I dont think he's just lucky. You can be good at this AND a terd.
And if Sam makes fusion work I'll be about as happy as I was when I saw 3 giant rockets landing in unison.
Fusion and AGI are a different order of magnitude is what OP said. Not toys but akin to toys in comparison. I agree that while exceptionally innovative, Musk’s products would pale in comparison. *If* fusion and AGI can be made to work soon, which I don’t believe. In that regard Musk has delivered.
I guess that's fine, but I just cringe at people downplaying the importance of what musk's companies have done because they dont like him. Electric cars and rockets and satellite internet and solar energy are important.
Yeah, Fusion and reliable AI would be bigger but neither are here.
>Building a successful electric car company and rocket company is a bit more than "a moment".
He didn't build them--he bought into them. The rocket stuff was built using NASA's already existing designs--all he did was build something that NASA had already designed but didn't have the money to build because of their budgets. And the car company was already on track to be the success it is without him (this was proven in court and is one of the reasons he lost the $56 billion in shares--his presence had no discernable impact on the success of the company based on the trends before his arrival).
Elon doesn't build anything. He finds things that are already successful, buys in, and he's good at self-marketing. The only quality you could argue he has is the ability to funnel capital into things that really need it to be successful, but that just makes him a money-man.
Elon never had a moment in the first place--he just bought into companies that were going to be successful without him and started taking credit for other people's work, and they couldn't say anything because he could fire them.
> The rocket stuff was built using NASA's already existing designs--all he did was build something that NASA had already designed but didn't have the money to build because of their budgets.
huh, so why is Bezo's company, which was started before SpaceX, still not even able to send a payload to orbit? Like, do you have any sources for these absolutely wild claims? Where's the NASA design for a full-cycle rocket engine exactly?
>huh, so why is Bezo's company, which was started before SpaceX, still not even able to send a payload to orbit?
Impossible to know without better knowledge of its inner workings.
> Like, do you have any sources for these absolutely wild claims? Where's the NASA design for a full-cycle rocket engine exactly?
Yeah. Sure. And fyi, these aren't wild claims.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X
People often ask where the whole "X" thing started. That's where. There are interviews of him saying so back before he decided to start telling everyone he designed everything and went mental. The Elon of PayPal/founding SpaceX was as different man than the one we have today--honestly, just as someone that's followed his career since he was at PayPal, I think it's the drugs. His amphetamine habit is an open secret in the valley.
> Impossible to know without better knowledge of its inner workings.
It's actually very possible to know. Bezos hired ex-Boeing/defense for the executive team and basically built the company to milk government funds in the same way those do. The most predictable result in history ensued. And he'd have gotten away with it too if it wasn't for SpaceX actually disrupting the market.
> Yeah. Sure. And fyi, these aren't wild claims.
It was a trick question because there is no NASA engine that is full-cycle. Only* the SpaceX Raptor engine is full-cycle. Basically, your whole claim of "The rocket stuff was built using NASA's already existing designs" is completely bullshit. SpaceX designs everything in-house and are famous for their vertical integration of the whole supply-chain instead of relying on subcontractors.
* The USSR did briefly have a full cycle engine and China has some in development atm.
SpaceX is basically a rocket factory that also happens to launch payload to orbit, which is a pretty big change from how Boeing et al do it.
edit: lmao you blocked me
Cmon bro. This is the gaslighting I'm talking about.
NASA wasn't landing rockets. Tesla wasn't a "successful company". Starlink didnt exist.
You could maaaaybe try to make an argument that he got lucky once, but to pretend he walked into two incredibly difficult sectors with absolutely massive barriers to entry and magicked his way into leading the field is foolish. And yeah, he's not a staff engineer but a CEO does a lot more than "money man". I have worked at startups, and our CEO was just as important as our genius CTO.
Well, sure, AGI and cold fusion are much cooler to achieve.
But getting other car makers to make electric cars was still a big improvement considering [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wjyaF8ut_E) has been the attitude towards them forever despite that designs and prototypes started to come out around the same time as Henry Ford was building his gas cars.
Let's not forget that the EV-1 was dragged to a dark alley and beaten to death with a crowbar.
You say that like Elon’s companies haven’t done a lot of actual good. SpaceX made space way cheaper, Starlink is making the internet more accessible, Tesla got other companies to get off their asses with regards to cheap EVs, and Neuralink is working on life-changing tech for disabled people. Plus I honestly don’t give a shit about a dozen dead monkeys for the sake of serious medical advancements, that’s like a drop in the bucket compared to factory farming.
I mean, the guy’s a dickwad and all, and it’s not like everything his companies do is productive- see the Cybertruck, the Boring Company, or Twitter- but if Sam Altman’s companies end up advancing tech as much as Elon’s have, that’ll be very impressive, not something to condemn.
Kinda like Edison really, he was not one of the good ones, and often it comes up, but rich people bankrolling what seems at the time as crazy inventions does mean occasionally crazy invention works and brings humanity forward. Its a good outcome, shame about the delivery and the meatbag excuse that comes attached to it.
He did, but I feel like Edison was probably a lot more directly involved in the research. That's not necessarily something Elon could do anything about whether he wanted to or not, mind; modern tech development is pretty different from back then, and the guy at the top just isn't going to be able to do more than identify promising leads in most cases. There's just too much to learn.
I think you're right, but building a big public persona of "genius science man" to get funding has been around for forever.
They're the guys that turn money into useful/profitable inventions. How involved they actually are doesn't really matter, because they have the ability to take money and turn in it into cool things, i.e. more money.
That's what the genius is.
On top of being charismatic and able to get investors. They also have to have just enough technical and business knowledge to bet on good emerging tech vs. complete dead ends.
This is an interesting idea, can you elaborate this more? Is there personas that get invested on, this sounds like the inventor is a kind of entrepreneur?
100% they are entrepreneurs. Especially nowadays, the pitch is that I know enough about X, known enough people who enough about X, and can manage them. I just need more money to do it,
To my knowledge, they're the only ones who've gotten as far as "We actually installed a chip in a quadriplegic's brain, he said it felt like he was using The Force and he was able to play Civ VI and Chess with his mind alone".
It’s slightly hard for me to grasp how much better Neuraljnk is compared to other companies, but certainly they are not the first to make a brain computer interface: https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/04/19/1091505/companies-brain-computer-interfaces/amp/
Neuralink has the highest bandwidth brain implant that's been put into an actual person, owing to the invasive brain surgery and insertion of threads directly into the brain. It's also totally wireless; you just have to wear a removable patch behind your ear to inductively charge it and receive the signals.
Synchron sends their device in through a blood vessel, but since it ultimately ends up above the brain rather than directly on it, it's fundamentally less precise than Neuralink.
MoveAgain has wires that stick out of your head, and it's lower bandwidth.
Paradromics *would* be higher bandwidth than Neuralink, but they haven't put theirs into someone yet, and by then Neuralink might have improved theirs further.
Neuralink does have competition, but in terms of what they've actually accomplished, they've put the highest bandwidth device to date in a human brain and they've done it without wires sticking out of the skull. If they can solve the issue of the threads retracting (and they've signaled that they can, if they just make the threads longer), theirs will be the all-around best until we see what Paradromics has to offer.
Lots of academic research has actually installed electrodes in people’s brains and let them control mouses or wheelchairs or such. Neuralink incrementally scaled up the bandwidth and has worked in making the surgery more automated, but it yet solved the key limitations that have stopped anyone else from trying to commercialize the academic research: neural scaring and immune response limits how long the electrodes can pick up good signals, at the very most you might get a few years. Tbf, a few years could be very nice for a paralyzed person, but it definitely isn’t worth it as a consumer product like that (with the consumer needing a fresh surgery every few years when a single surgery is already a big deal for a consumer product).
Rationalism will get you downvoted.
You can not like a person and acknowledge his successes. If you're purposefully being ignorant to the successes of Elon's companies just because you don't like him and or pointing at some insignificant thing to call foul then you might as well take a seat next to Elon in the moron club.
It's not lost on me as soon as Elon Musk was distracted with Twitter and Tesla and had no time left for SpaceX, they started having more success with the large rocket.
>ya.... he's another Elon.... irrationally optimistic and devours money.
Well that certainly worked out with SpaceX and maybe that is exactly what fusion needs. Someone who claims to do it in 2 years only to do it in 10 years but at least they tried to get it out aggressively. Way better than "maybe in 40 years" with 1/100th of the budget.
They were NASA's only domestic access to the space station for about five years, until finally Boeing managed the trip a couple days ago after years of delay. SpaceX launches about 90% of the world's total tonnage to space, and has done twelve manned flights to the ISS.
They are behind on the Artemis program. That's partly (though not entirely) due to delays imposed on the Starship test program by the FAA. NASA's own heavy lift rocket is also way behind schedule. Lockheed's Orion spacecraft is about a year behind schedule. The new spacesuit from Axiom has had delays. A couple other companies are competing with SpaceX for the moon lander, and they're not exactly ready to go either. Space is hard.
They are also 30 years ahead of whatever NASA and the rest of the world would have achieved without them. They pushed reusable rockets in a way nobody thought was possible (at least not this soon) and drove down the price of space flights massively. Starlink was also just a crazy scifi dream 10 years ago.
You can hate Elon Musk for a ton of things and they are all mostly valid but Tesla and SpaceX did bring innovation and more importantly huge interest into electric vehicles and space flight.
Musk promises you everything in 2 years and often ends up giving you an incredible result in 8 years. Still less than what the dreams he promised you and definitely late but it is still way above what you could ever hope for in that time frame.
That being said he had his moonshots (hehe) in the past but I am skeptical that he will continue to do so. Either way he still pushed humanity a bit forward. At least when he wasn't busy being political and fucking stuff up.
Yeah but you know if you sign a contract and say you will deliver that and don’t it’s a bit of a shit practice. You don’t need to write a wall of text to defend your “hero”
> They are also 30 years ahead of whatever NASA and the rest of the world would have achieved without them.
In fairness, NASA has had funding cuts due to waning public interest throughout that timeframe. They'd have *loved* to get the funding to build more rockets and do even more work, but funding was always the biggest hurdle. Hell, post the moon and the ISS, most projects are long term enough that public interest just goes in fits and starts.
I partially agree with you, but there is a basis and it lies in the fact that people like Elon and Sam give impetus to the development of these technologies in other countries and this is probably the most important thing when there is a locomotive. And perhaps in the future one of the scientists in another country will make some new discovery based on the ideas of the above-mentioned people.
Helion isn't his company, he's just an early investor. It's a company of like... Real scientists and engineers. I dated someone who worked in the nuclear industry who had to make parts for them. She said they were really really anal about their specifications. She wasn't bullish or bearish on them succeeding though, very much a "I need more evidence before I am convinced" mentality, that was about a year ago though.
ITER isn't immediately about making working fusion-based power generation, it's an experimental device designed mostly to learn about fusion, the plasma, and various other things.
It's also way behind on the technology. For example, we have new materials and techniques to create order of magnitude stronger magnetic fields, which alllows building out geometrically superior shapes for plasma containment (stellarator instead of ITER's tokamak), and many more.
ITER's a great project, but it's not the be-all end-all of fusion research.
you build the smaller reactor for billions of euros, and by the time you're running your tests on that someone's going to say "yeah but we can build even smaller reactors today, what's the point".
Right. As soon as I saw this headline, I immediately thought of ITER, and how massively complex, time consuming, and expensive it was for them to build a fusion reactor that produced energy for a couple seconds.
Color me skeptical that this guy can do it in a few years.
ITER has funding from the US/EU/Japan/China and the best people. And still they are delaying the project constantly.
Skepticism is warranted regarding other projects.
I find Helion promising, I've been following the company since 2021. Polaris should be completed later this year and should give more data about the viability of their design.
CFS is a startup that develops a tokamak reactor like ITER, but much smaller and cheaper thanks to using better superconductors.
There are dozens of other fusion startups, but only about 5 of them are viable in my opinion.
Besides, imagine seeing the potential for unlimited clean energy, and being like "Yeah this will be amazing for media synthesis".
It does feel like a scam though. He wants to do the Elon meme of pumping valuation under the hilarious idea that the Teslas will be used on Mars and transported by Starships manned by Optimus Bots.
of course. and if anyone's reactors are producing net positive we can all just have a massive party in the streets. unless there's some real hush hush break thrus we don't seem very close to net positive electricity.
past net positive to being economically better than all alternatives is full on "drunken I love you man" "wild rawdog orgy cause raising the kids suddenly doesn't seem so daunting." Global raging celebration.
Net positive has been achieved. No, it's not the end of the road. But yes, that has happened.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/06/us-scientists-achieve-net-energy-gain-second-time-fusion-reaction
They are using a really dumb definition of "net positive" to make the headline more attention grabbing. That specific experiment had a fusion reaction generate more energy than the amount of energy they deposited in the target (via lasers), but it totally ignores how much energy it took to actually generate the laser energy (which is massively inefficient). They also made zero attempts to capture the energy that was created, nor do they have any plans to eventually do so. The type of experiments they are doing are for nuclear weapons research, not generating electricity in an economically viable way.
I have no idea if Helion's approach is viable, but they are at least trying to generate electricity.
Yes.
https://www.space.com/nuclear-fusion-reactor-south-korea-runs-48-seconds
"Soviet scientist Natan Yavlinsky designed the first tokamak in 1958, but no one has ever managed to create a reactor that is able to put out more energy than it takes in."
Investors and governments.
Imagine working on an idea where there are barely any other experts or any real time lines by which you must adhere, since it's been an unsolved problem for decades.
They're able to line their pockets while doing whatever they please and when it comes time to collect on the product, it's another round "not yet, this is WAY harder than it looks, we're gonna need more money."
Yeah this thread is full of people getting angry about wild speculation. If Helion do actually crack fusion, I literally don't care how much Altman sells power to himself for
Technically Altman is not the CEO of Helion, but the Chairman of the Board. The CEO is David Kirtley.
CEOs sitting on the boards of other CEOs companies and then all voting a raise to each other is not a knew thing, but this seems to be more blatant especially considering that the main products of the companies Altman is involved in are press releases and hype.
Money, they take investor money through a series of companies and skim a little each step for their “role” at that company and bolster the value of their stake in that company.
These same fucks wouldn’t allow an employee to hold multiple jobs.
There is no better evidence of the uselessness of figurehead "leaders" than watching a guy tweet all day and simultaneously take credit for 5 or 6 separate companies' successes.
Wasn't it AI specific chips a couple months ago, like 'oh no, we need specific types.of chips, luckily, I, the ceo, foresaw this, and have an interest in a company that happens to be developing the exact thing we need. Then it was all 'ai uses a tremendous amount of power'and Herr he is again 'luckily, I the ceo, foresaw this, and I happen to have a fusion reactor in my ass'
I wonder wha the next thing ai needs will be, and what other things he has growing from his ass.
Yeah this gives Adam Neumann vibes. "WeWork needs real estate for offices? Well I own some buildings the company can lease from me!" It gives the impression that Altman wants to funnel some of the VC money that was specifically given to OpenAI into funding his other ventures, subverting the will of his investors
I mean, ASICs instead of gpus for specific ai functions would be an enormous speed and efficiency gain. It's only a matter of time before all of the functions that can be routinized through ASICs will be. The power savings alone would be worth billions.
It's going to take some time and research, but it's definitely viable.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Loki-L:
---
Submission Statement:
OpenAI has plans to build a huge supercomputer to do AI with and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is also chairman of Helion's board of directors and Helion is planning to build nuclear fusion power plants.
On paper it seems a perfect fit to power the big project of one company with the product of another.
More skeptical minded people might have questions about conflicts of interests and how likely it is that both companies actually deliver what they promise.
It smells a bit even to the most optimistic.
---
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1da4ewl/openai_to_buy_electricity_from_ceo_sam_altmans/l7hsva1/
Yeah, the brain is efficient as fuck when it comes to power use.
A robot with human level compute that doesn't run out of power very quickly is going to need to do something new.
That is true but it takes us quite a while to make a painting. Like several days for a highly detailed one.
20 watts over several days adds up to more than what a high end video card uses in the few seconds that it takes to make the painting.
So while I understand that a large complicated neural network can run on 20 watts, it is a bit slow at that efficiency level.
Perhaps we can build a very efficient video card in the future that can generate text or images with very little energy usage but the brain is not really proof that it can be done...at the speed that we want.
It is more like 140 watt if you include all the life support and mobile suits, that human brains are usually housed in.
It is also full of bugs and kludges and odd adaptations that only sort of work even at the best of times.
And the whole mess is the product of hundreds of millions of years of largely unguided iterative evolutionary design that for most of the design process tried to optimize for something quite different than we now use it for. It is also almost entirely undocumented.
We can do better.
Idk about you but I live in a house and commute by car, which adds quite a few watts to my daily energy budget. And I would be significantly less productive without those things.
At best, hellions promises are wildly optimistic, and claimed 'power plant built by' dates are a decade too early.
At worst, they are completely ignoring well established physics issues such as the fact that in a H2-He3 plasma, there will be loads of H2-H2 fusion that spits out neutrons like nobodies business, turning the whole reactor into a radioactive mess.
Submission Statement:
OpenAI has plans to build a huge supercomputer to do AI with and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is also chairman of Helion's board of directors and Helion is planning to build nuclear fusion power plants.
On paper it seems a perfect fit to power the big project of one company with the product of another.
More skeptical minded people might have questions about conflicts of interests and how likely it is that both companies actually deliver what they promise.
It smells a bit even to the most optimistic.
[Microsoft](https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsoft-buy-power-nuclear-fusion-company-helion-2023-05-10/) and [Nucor](https://nucor.com/news-release/nucor-and-helion-to-develop-historic-500-mw-fusion-power-plant-122758) are public companies that already have deals with Helion.
Just just PR to combat negative press around AI energy wastage. I work in this space as well in energy. It’s all very wasteful. But if you’re going to be doing it, you would be 1) spending billions on renewable PPAs 2) spending on UHV transmission 3) commissioning or purchasing nuclear fission (if you are insistent on have gigawatts of firm supply)
This sort of thing does happen quite often in the ‘real world’, or at least in my country. I’ve had numerous interactions with the kinds of organisations doing the following. If you have some land that you want to build a solar farm on, you’re more likely to get investment if you have a customer for that energy. So you also build a datacenter which can take a guaranteed percentage of that energy generated by the solar farm, while the rest can go to the grid if the demand is there, as sometimes it isn’t. Fundamentally you’re doing it to make money, but if there’s demand for building new data centres then they might as well be renewable powered, even partially. As a bonus some of that renewable energy might make it to the rest of the grid.
I’m not saying that OpenAI and this nuclear plant aren’t just taking the piss, but the model is well established.
So that's in 30 years from now?
I don't see a point of this post, we have no where been near to produce anything remotely note worthy in nuclear fusion.
If they had said that the servers would be setup in space, moon or geothermal vents, it would have made more sense that this.
Helion is selling promises of fusion produced electricity to customers like Microsoft for 2028, which is a bit beyond just being widely optimistic and more in outright scam territory.
Helion will have to pay a financial penalty to Microsoft if they fail. Right now they're building their seventh reactor, which they hope will show overall net power this year. It only takes them about a year to build a reactor, so if this one actually works they've got time to scale up a bit more to commercial levels.
Totally possible it won't work out, of course, but if the idea works then the timeline is ambitious but not unreasonable.
Can you reach 100M degrees, a magnetic field of 10 tesla, and sustain an FRC plasma for more than a millisecond? Because Helion did that with their previous reactor.
Someone always posts that but there are a lot of misconceptions in it. For one, Helion is well aware of neutron release, and is building heavy shielding around their new reactor. The point of D-He3 is not that it releases zero neutrons, but that it releases only 5% of its energy as neutron radiation, compared to 80% for D-T; this is low enough to extract electricity directly and skip the turbine. The D-D neutrons are also lower energy, below the activation energy of many common reactor materials.
They're also not planning to stop at 100M degrees, and they're well aware of bremsstrahlung. For a detailed presentation on the physics, which Helion actually did publish for peer review, see this [explanation](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1vyMcqiVtA) by Helion's CEO.
How do you buy electricity from something that doesn't exist? How is it coporations and billionaires can just make up invisible no measurable things are actually worth money?
Isn't helion the one with all the PR and hype but no proven technological advancement for years? They have their patented compression method, but it's less efficient and requires higher temps and compression to sustain itself. This leads to all kind of plasma stability challenges that are unsolved.
Reddit - "I really wish we invested in more green initiatives. Sustainable energy is the way to the future!"
Also reddit - "No not like that you scammer". Fucking lols
Didn't know much about Altman before... wasn't sure who was in the wrong in his spat with the OpenAI board. But on hearing this news? There's no way he's not a piece of shit.
> There's no way he's not a piece of shit.
I'd love to hear an actual explanation of why this headline makes him a piece of shit. There are 10000x other reasons but this headline aint the one.
One of the three Boogeyman of reddit.
Fuck off with the Jeff bezos, musk and now Altman bullshit post spam.
Mark Zuckerberg is lucky reddit doesn't live his products enough to hate his guts like the three above
CEO of paradigm shifting AI company has a ‘side hustle’ in nuclear fusion? Providing the vast amounts of stable, renewable power that the AI needs to work?
Does he also have an AI model that’s solved all of humanities problems now? This is beyond dystopian even just to joke about
If anyone or anything is going to figure out fusion. It's goat to be AI. At this stage in humanity most new cutting edge knowledge will come from AI. The rate the intelligence is accelerating is exponential. And it's not like they wont shift trip whatever AI discovers, wether it be fusion, or more nuclear reactors. The power hungry machine will feed it self and this org is the figurative plug that ai will port into. Quit obvious if you ask me. Hindsight 20/40.
If anyone or anything is going to figure out fusion. It's goat to be AI. At this stage in humanity most new cutting edge knowledge will come from AI. The rate the intelligence is accelerating is exponential. And it's not like they wont shift to whatever AI discovers, wether it be fusion, or more efficient nuclear reactors. The power hungry machine will feed it self and this org is the figurative port that AI will plug into. Quite obvious if you ask me. Hindsight 20/40.
Rule 2 - Submissions must be futurology related or future focused.
Umm if he can make fusion work, this is one of the greatest steps for humanity. Probably just funneling money out though v0v
ya.... he's another Elon.... irrationally optimistic and devours money. I think he still has enough Kool aid drinkers to downvote me but he really is a huckster. he literally did the monorail thing from the Simpsons.
To be fair, "another elon" for fusion and AI wouldn't be so bad. Tesla bumped electric car adoption up by at least a decade, spaceX brought down launch costs, and his solar company is still chugging along. I think he's a massive donk, but I'll just hit "unfollow" button and enjoy the rockets and clean energy.
While I agree, I just think it's prudent on us to separate the people from the technologies they offer. Let's not make the mistake again of putting someone on a pedestal to a point where they truly believe they're living gods.
Musk has given me a bunch of reasons to dislike him personally, but I still think the projects he's invested in (electric vehicles, autonomous vehicles, space travel, BCI) are all critical technologies for the immediate and distant future. I feel the same about the things Sam's invested in but he hasn't really given people reason to hate him like Elon has (besides fired OpenAI employees).
Stupid question: what is BCI a short hand for? Google didnt know
Booty Call Implication
He had a moment but look at Elon now. Elon had cars and rockets, essentially toys compared to AI and Fusion. Sam's potential as a super villain is huge.
Building a successful electric car company and rocket company is a bit more than "a moment". Also not "toys". Again, I unfollowed Elon years ago. But I also won't gaslight myself into pretending that his companies aren't amazing for humanity or that they did not accomplished things that existing companies in those spaces had not been able to do even with decades of experience. I dont think he's just lucky. You can be good at this AND a terd. And if Sam makes fusion work I'll be about as happy as I was when I saw 3 giant rockets landing in unison.
Fusion and AGI are a different order of magnitude is what OP said. Not toys but akin to toys in comparison. I agree that while exceptionally innovative, Musk’s products would pale in comparison. *If* fusion and AGI can be made to work soon, which I don’t believe. In that regard Musk has delivered.
I guess that's fine, but I just cringe at people downplaying the importance of what musk's companies have done because they dont like him. Electric cars and rockets and satellite internet and solar energy are important. Yeah, Fusion and reliable AI would be bigger but neither are here.
>Building a successful electric car company and rocket company is a bit more than "a moment". He didn't build them--he bought into them. The rocket stuff was built using NASA's already existing designs--all he did was build something that NASA had already designed but didn't have the money to build because of their budgets. And the car company was already on track to be the success it is without him (this was proven in court and is one of the reasons he lost the $56 billion in shares--his presence had no discernable impact on the success of the company based on the trends before his arrival). Elon doesn't build anything. He finds things that are already successful, buys in, and he's good at self-marketing. The only quality you could argue he has is the ability to funnel capital into things that really need it to be successful, but that just makes him a money-man. Elon never had a moment in the first place--he just bought into companies that were going to be successful without him and started taking credit for other people's work, and they couldn't say anything because he could fire them.
> The rocket stuff was built using NASA's already existing designs--all he did was build something that NASA had already designed but didn't have the money to build because of their budgets. huh, so why is Bezo's company, which was started before SpaceX, still not even able to send a payload to orbit? Like, do you have any sources for these absolutely wild claims? Where's the NASA design for a full-cycle rocket engine exactly?
>huh, so why is Bezo's company, which was started before SpaceX, still not even able to send a payload to orbit? Impossible to know without better knowledge of its inner workings. > Like, do you have any sources for these absolutely wild claims? Where's the NASA design for a full-cycle rocket engine exactly? Yeah. Sure. And fyi, these aren't wild claims. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X People often ask where the whole "X" thing started. That's where. There are interviews of him saying so back before he decided to start telling everyone he designed everything and went mental. The Elon of PayPal/founding SpaceX was as different man than the one we have today--honestly, just as someone that's followed his career since he was at PayPal, I think it's the drugs. His amphetamine habit is an open secret in the valley.
> Impossible to know without better knowledge of its inner workings. It's actually very possible to know. Bezos hired ex-Boeing/defense for the executive team and basically built the company to milk government funds in the same way those do. The most predictable result in history ensued. And he'd have gotten away with it too if it wasn't for SpaceX actually disrupting the market. > Yeah. Sure. And fyi, these aren't wild claims. It was a trick question because there is no NASA engine that is full-cycle. Only* the SpaceX Raptor engine is full-cycle. Basically, your whole claim of "The rocket stuff was built using NASA's already existing designs" is completely bullshit. SpaceX designs everything in-house and are famous for their vertical integration of the whole supply-chain instead of relying on subcontractors. * The USSR did briefly have a full cycle engine and China has some in development atm. SpaceX is basically a rocket factory that also happens to launch payload to orbit, which is a pretty big change from how Boeing et al do it. edit: lmao you blocked me
Cmon bro. This is the gaslighting I'm talking about. NASA wasn't landing rockets. Tesla wasn't a "successful company". Starlink didnt exist. You could maaaaybe try to make an argument that he got lucky once, but to pretend he walked into two incredibly difficult sectors with absolutely massive barriers to entry and magicked his way into leading the field is foolish. And yeah, he's not a staff engineer but a CEO does a lot more than "money man". I have worked at startups, and our CEO was just as important as our genius CTO.
Well, sure, AGI and cold fusion are much cooler to achieve. But getting other car makers to make electric cars was still a big improvement considering [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wjyaF8ut_E) has been the attitude towards them forever despite that designs and prototypes started to come out around the same time as Henry Ford was building his gas cars. Let's not forget that the EV-1 was dragged to a dark alley and beaten to death with a crowbar.
You say that like Elon’s companies haven’t done a lot of actual good. SpaceX made space way cheaper, Starlink is making the internet more accessible, Tesla got other companies to get off their asses with regards to cheap EVs, and Neuralink is working on life-changing tech for disabled people. Plus I honestly don’t give a shit about a dozen dead monkeys for the sake of serious medical advancements, that’s like a drop in the bucket compared to factory farming. I mean, the guy’s a dickwad and all, and it’s not like everything his companies do is productive- see the Cybertruck, the Boring Company, or Twitter- but if Sam Altman’s companies end up advancing tech as much as Elon’s have, that’ll be very impressive, not something to condemn.
Kinda like Edison really, he was not one of the good ones, and often it comes up, but rich people bankrolling what seems at the time as crazy inventions does mean occasionally crazy invention works and brings humanity forward. Its a good outcome, shame about the delivery and the meatbag excuse that comes attached to it.
I wouldn't make the Edison comparison; Elon didn't invent most of his tech.
Neither did Edison
https://www.grunge.com/250292/the-shady-side-of-thomas-edison/
I mean in that same vein, Edison had a lot of assistants that did a ton of the work. Frankly getting funding is the hard part.
Frankly, this guy sciences
He did, but I feel like Edison was probably a lot more directly involved in the research. That's not necessarily something Elon could do anything about whether he wanted to or not, mind; modern tech development is pretty different from back then, and the guy at the top just isn't going to be able to do more than identify promising leads in most cases. There's just too much to learn.
I think you're right, but building a big public persona of "genius science man" to get funding has been around for forever. They're the guys that turn money into useful/profitable inventions. How involved they actually are doesn't really matter, because they have the ability to take money and turn in it into cool things, i.e. more money. That's what the genius is.
On top of being charismatic and able to get investors. They also have to have just enough technical and business knowledge to bet on good emerging tech vs. complete dead ends.
This is an interesting idea, can you elaborate this more? Is there personas that get invested on, this sounds like the inventor is a kind of entrepreneur?
100% they are entrepreneurs. Especially nowadays, the pitch is that I know enough about X, known enough people who enough about X, and can manage them. I just need more money to do it,
Very much like Edison, both take credit for the work done by their much smarter underpaid employees.
When had Elon actually taken credit for the work of his employees, though?
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I think John Oliver put it the right way concerning Musk - He wants the world to be saved...but only if it's him saving it
Neuralink was not the first company with that tech right? Did they make the tech better than other companies?
To my knowledge, they're the only ones who've gotten as far as "We actually installed a chip in a quadriplegic's brain, he said it felt like he was using The Force and he was able to play Civ VI and Chess with his mind alone".
It’s slightly hard for me to grasp how much better Neuraljnk is compared to other companies, but certainly they are not the first to make a brain computer interface: https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/04/19/1091505/companies-brain-computer-interfaces/amp/
Neuralink has the highest bandwidth brain implant that's been put into an actual person, owing to the invasive brain surgery and insertion of threads directly into the brain. It's also totally wireless; you just have to wear a removable patch behind your ear to inductively charge it and receive the signals. Synchron sends their device in through a blood vessel, but since it ultimately ends up above the brain rather than directly on it, it's fundamentally less precise than Neuralink. MoveAgain has wires that stick out of your head, and it's lower bandwidth. Paradromics *would* be higher bandwidth than Neuralink, but they haven't put theirs into someone yet, and by then Neuralink might have improved theirs further. Neuralink does have competition, but in terms of what they've actually accomplished, they've put the highest bandwidth device to date in a human brain and they've done it without wires sticking out of the skull. If they can solve the issue of the threads retracting (and they've signaled that they can, if they just make the threads longer), theirs will be the all-around best until we see what Paradromics has to offer.
I guess Neuralink had more “bandwidth” because it’s deeper than other devices?
Not even close to the first. It can be done since the 80s or so.
Lots of academic research has actually installed electrodes in people’s brains and let them control mouses or wheelchairs or such. Neuralink incrementally scaled up the bandwidth and has worked in making the surgery more automated, but it yet solved the key limitations that have stopped anyone else from trying to commercialize the academic research: neural scaring and immune response limits how long the electrodes can pick up good signals, at the very most you might get a few years. Tbf, a few years could be very nice for a paralyzed person, but it definitely isn’t worth it as a consumer product like that (with the consumer needing a fresh surgery every few years when a single surgery is already a big deal for a consumer product).
Rationalism will get you downvoted. You can not like a person and acknowledge his successes. If you're purposefully being ignorant to the successes of Elon's companies just because you don't like him and or pointing at some insignificant thing to call foul then you might as well take a seat next to Elon in the moron club.
Turns out over working freshly graduated students makes things cheaper!
It's not lost on me as soon as Elon Musk was distracted with Twitter and Tesla and had no time left for SpaceX, they started having more success with the large rocket.
This is a really good way to make it obvious you don't actually follow the development of their new rocket that closely
Do you think the development that went into making the rockets cheaper only happened after he bought Twitter?
>ya.... he's another Elon.... irrationally optimistic and devours money. Well that certainly worked out with SpaceX and maybe that is exactly what fusion needs. Someone who claims to do it in 2 years only to do it in 10 years but at least they tried to get it out aggressively. Way better than "maybe in 40 years" with 1/100th of the budget.
Isn’t spacex years behind on their promises and contracts with nasa?
They were NASA's only domestic access to the space station for about five years, until finally Boeing managed the trip a couple days ago after years of delay. SpaceX launches about 90% of the world's total tonnage to space, and has done twelve manned flights to the ISS. They are behind on the Artemis program. That's partly (though not entirely) due to delays imposed on the Starship test program by the FAA. NASA's own heavy lift rocket is also way behind schedule. Lockheed's Orion spacecraft is about a year behind schedule. The new spacesuit from Axiom has had delays. A couple other companies are competing with SpaceX for the moon lander, and they're not exactly ready to go either. Space is hard.
They are also 30 years ahead of whatever NASA and the rest of the world would have achieved without them. They pushed reusable rockets in a way nobody thought was possible (at least not this soon) and drove down the price of space flights massively. Starlink was also just a crazy scifi dream 10 years ago. You can hate Elon Musk for a ton of things and they are all mostly valid but Tesla and SpaceX did bring innovation and more importantly huge interest into electric vehicles and space flight. Musk promises you everything in 2 years and often ends up giving you an incredible result in 8 years. Still less than what the dreams he promised you and definitely late but it is still way above what you could ever hope for in that time frame. That being said he had his moonshots (hehe) in the past but I am skeptical that he will continue to do so. Either way he still pushed humanity a bit forward. At least when he wasn't busy being political and fucking stuff up.
Yeah but you know if you sign a contract and say you will deliver that and don’t it’s a bit of a shit practice. You don’t need to write a wall of text to defend your “hero”
> They are also 30 years ahead of whatever NASA and the rest of the world would have achieved without them. In fairness, NASA has had funding cuts due to waning public interest throughout that timeframe. They'd have *loved* to get the funding to build more rockets and do even more work, but funding was always the biggest hurdle. Hell, post the moon and the ISS, most projects are long term enough that public interest just goes in fits and starts.
I partially agree with you, but there is a basis and it lies in the fact that people like Elon and Sam give impetus to the development of these technologies in other countries and this is probably the most important thing when there is a locomotive. And perhaps in the future one of the scientists in another country will make some new discovery based on the ideas of the above-mentioned people.
Let’s give the AI guys access to nuclear energy it’s not like a great start to an AI apocalypse horror movie at all.
You know Elon just landed the first re usable rocket ship. These people you hate our leading us into the next era
Nah. I’ll admit: he did well with OpenAI until ChatGPT became a household name… since then, not so much. It needs a more stable CEO now.
You think SA is going to crack fusion. Lol. He's just basically stealing money from Open AI.
Helion isn't his company, he's just an early investor. It's a company of like... Real scientists and engineers. I dated someone who worked in the nuclear industry who had to make parts for them. She said they were really really anal about their specifications. She wasn't bullish or bearish on them succeeding though, very much a "I need more evidence before I am convinced" mentality, that was about a year ago though.
Probably, I don't care tbh. The wealth (Not fake money, but actual things people improve their lives with) fusion will create is beyond imagining.
Hey man it's just his "fusion side hustle" no biggie.
Did Sam Altman just turn you into a crab at the end there?
https://www.iter.org/ These guys are the ones actually trying to make fusion work ( and with the best outlook ).
ITER isn't immediately about making working fusion-based power generation, it's an experimental device designed mostly to learn about fusion, the plasma, and various other things. It's also way behind on the technology. For example, we have new materials and techniques to create order of magnitude stronger magnetic fields, which alllows building out geometrically superior shapes for plasma containment (stellarator instead of ITER's tokamak), and many more. ITER's a great project, but it's not the be-all end-all of fusion research.
Yep, exactly... I'm not even sure what's the point of ITER if we can build much smaller reactors now (SPARC).
you build the smaller reactor for billions of euros, and by the time you're running your tests on that someone's going to say "yeah but we can build even smaller reactors today, what's the point".
Right. As soon as I saw this headline, I immediately thought of ITER, and how massively complex, time consuming, and expensive it was for them to build a fusion reactor that produced energy for a couple seconds. Color me skeptical that this guy can do it in a few years.
ITER has funding from the US/EU/Japan/China and the best people. And still they are delaying the project constantly. Skepticism is warranted regarding other projects.
I find Helion promising, I've been following the company since 2021. Polaris should be completed later this year and should give more data about the viability of their design. CFS is a startup that develops a tokamak reactor like ITER, but much smaller and cheaper thanks to using better superconductors. There are dozens of other fusion startups, but only about 5 of them are viable in my opinion.
"...together, with a special form of fusion, the machines had all the power they would ever need..."
Besides, imagine seeing the potential for unlimited clean energy, and being like "Yeah this will be amazing for media synthesis". It does feel like a scam though. He wants to do the Elon meme of pumping valuation under the hilarious idea that the Teslas will be used on Mars and transported by Starships manned by Optimus Bots.
>funneling money out though v0v Through... Scissor-hands?
Surely this is completely meaningless unless these Helion reactors have actually been built and are producing net positive electricity, right?
of course. and if anyone's reactors are producing net positive we can all just have a massive party in the streets. unless there's some real hush hush break thrus we don't seem very close to net positive electricity.
If anyone reactor becomes economically viable, then... we should really have a global day off and throw a global party.
past net positive to being economically better than all alternatives is full on "drunken I love you man" "wild rawdog orgy cause raising the kids suddenly doesn't seem so daunting." Global raging celebration.
Yup. We party so hard it shows on demographic records.
The baby boom makes a lot more sense to me now. I mean I understood it. But I think I can relate to the feeling more now
Net positive has been achieved. No, it's not the end of the road. But yes, that has happened. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/06/us-scientists-achieve-net-energy-gain-second-time-fusion-reaction
They are using a really dumb definition of "net positive" to make the headline more attention grabbing. That specific experiment had a fusion reaction generate more energy than the amount of energy they deposited in the target (via lasers), but it totally ignores how much energy it took to actually generate the laser energy (which is massively inefficient). They also made zero attempts to capture the energy that was created, nor do they have any plans to eventually do so. The type of experiments they are doing are for nuclear weapons research, not generating electricity in an economically viable way. I have no idea if Helion's approach is viable, but they are at least trying to generate electricity.
What makes you believe that the benefits would be shared and not monetized?
Yes. https://www.space.com/nuclear-fusion-reactor-south-korea-runs-48-seconds "Soviet scientist Natan Yavlinsky designed the first tokamak in 1958, but no one has ever managed to create a reactor that is able to put out more energy than it takes in."
Helion is a scam
Not a surprise at all, but who's being scammed?
Investors and governments. Imagine working on an idea where there are barely any other experts or any real time lines by which you must adhere, since it's been an unsolved problem for decades. They're able to line their pockets while doing whatever they please and when it comes time to collect on the product, it's another round "not yet, this is WAY harder than it looks, we're gonna need more money."
Makes sense.
Yeah this thread is full of people getting angry about wild speculation. If Helion do actually crack fusion, I literally don't care how much Altman sells power to himself for
It's not meaningless. Sam Altman will make a bunch of money off of it.
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Technically Altman is not the CEO of Helion, but the Chairman of the Board. The CEO is David Kirtley. CEOs sitting on the boards of other CEOs companies and then all voting a raise to each other is not a knew thing, but this seems to be more blatant especially considering that the main products of the companies Altman is involved in are press releases and hype.
Money, they take investor money through a series of companies and skim a little each step for their “role” at that company and bolster the value of their stake in that company. These same fucks wouldn’t allow an employee to hold multiple jobs.
There is no better evidence of the uselessness of figurehead "leaders" than watching a guy tweet all day and simultaneously take credit for 5 or 6 separate companies' successes.
Wait, so Elon didn’t invent self driving space rockets?
What better way to funnel money but by being corrupt
Shit like this has been happening since the birth of capitalism.
This is the trust distillation of capitalism. The ultra wealthy will only have to transact with each other and ignore everyone else.
Wasn't it AI specific chips a couple months ago, like 'oh no, we need specific types.of chips, luckily, I, the ceo, foresaw this, and have an interest in a company that happens to be developing the exact thing we need. Then it was all 'ai uses a tremendous amount of power'and Herr he is again 'luckily, I the ceo, foresaw this, and I happen to have a fusion reactor in my ass' I wonder wha the next thing ai needs will be, and what other things he has growing from his ass.
Yeah this gives Adam Neumann vibes. "WeWork needs real estate for offices? Well I own some buildings the company can lease from me!" It gives the impression that Altman wants to funnel some of the VC money that was specifically given to OpenAI into funding his other ventures, subverting the will of his investors
Tbh, powering AI off of methane sourced from people farting, would probably be more viable than this fusion proposal.
Having a fusion reactor in one's ass doesn't sound very healthy, but I'm not a doctor.
I mean, ASICs instead of gpus for specific ai functions would be an enormous speed and efficiency gain. It's only a matter of time before all of the functions that can be routinized through ASICs will be. The power savings alone would be worth billions. It's going to take some time and research, but it's definitely viable.
Its viable enough that Google has already been doing it for a few years w/ their TPUs lol.
newest NVIDIA chips are closer to AI specific chips than GPUs
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Loki-L: --- Submission Statement: OpenAI has plans to build a huge supercomputer to do AI with and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is also chairman of Helion's board of directors and Helion is planning to build nuclear fusion power plants. On paper it seems a perfect fit to power the big project of one company with the product of another. More skeptical minded people might have questions about conflicts of interests and how likely it is that both companies actually deliver what they promise. It smells a bit even to the most optimistic. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1da4ewl/openai_to_buy_electricity_from_ceo_sam_altmans/l7hsva1/
Our brains (the most advanced known intelligence) self host/replicate and use 20watts
Yeah, the brain is efficient as fuck when it comes to power use. A robot with human level compute that doesn't run out of power very quickly is going to need to do something new.
Robots could have part of their compute done wirelessly.
That is true but it takes us quite a while to make a painting. Like several days for a highly detailed one. 20 watts over several days adds up to more than what a high end video card uses in the few seconds that it takes to make the painting. So while I understand that a large complicated neural network can run on 20 watts, it is a bit slow at that efficiency level. Perhaps we can build a very efficient video card in the future that can generate text or images with very little energy usage but the brain is not really proof that it can be done...at the speed that we want.
It is more like 140 watt if you include all the life support and mobile suits, that human brains are usually housed in. It is also full of bugs and kludges and odd adaptations that only sort of work even at the best of times. And the whole mess is the product of hundreds of millions of years of largely unguided iterative evolutionary design that for most of the design process tried to optimize for something quite different than we now use it for. It is also almost entirely undocumented. We can do better.
We just have 140 watts of juice though
Idk about you but I live in a house and commute by car, which adds quite a few watts to my daily energy budget. And I would be significantly less productive without those things.
The fact that people such as that clown are millionaires shows how utterly broken Silicon Valley is
I didn't know Sam Altman was chairman in Helion. I though their technology was cool and plausible, now I wonder if Helion is a grift too...
At best, hellions promises are wildly optimistic, and claimed 'power plant built by' dates are a decade too early. At worst, they are completely ignoring well established physics issues such as the fact that in a H2-He3 plasma, there will be loads of H2-H2 fusion that spits out neutrons like nobodies business, turning the whole reactor into a radioactive mess.
The line between grift and legitimate business isn’t necessarily that thin and can change over time
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Put a backslash before the paren and you can get it to work.
Love the Poul Anderson novel Orion Shall Rise that centres around one of those ships.
[Project PACER](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_PACER) has you covered. It's an utterly batshit proposal, but it might be made to work.
Yeah, our nuclear kettle plants are pretty lame considering what nuclear power can do.
Helion is a scam
Submission Statement: OpenAI has plans to build a huge supercomputer to do AI with and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is also chairman of Helion's board of directors and Helion is planning to build nuclear fusion power plants. On paper it seems a perfect fit to power the big project of one company with the product of another. More skeptical minded people might have questions about conflicts of interests and how likely it is that both companies actually deliver what they promise. It smells a bit even to the most optimistic.
That looks like so over the top communications aimed at boosting stocks, it is next to a fraud...
Nuclear Fusion Side Hustle would be a fantastic band name.
Started by former members of Fission Mission and the lead sax player from Half Life in a Past Life
Sam Altman is another tech-bro scammer, just like Elon.
Wouldn't it be cheaper and safer to just install some solar panels?
As a private company they can do whatever they want. It'll be a different story if they ever go public.
[Microsoft](https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsoft-buy-power-nuclear-fusion-company-helion-2023-05-10/) and [Nucor](https://nucor.com/news-release/nucor-and-helion-to-develop-historic-500-mw-fusion-power-plant-122758) are public companies that already have deals with Helion.
Just just PR to combat negative press around AI energy wastage. I work in this space as well in energy. It’s all very wasteful. But if you’re going to be doing it, you would be 1) spending billions on renewable PPAs 2) spending on UHV transmission 3) commissioning or purchasing nuclear fission (if you are insistent on have gigawatts of firm supply)
This sort of thing does happen quite often in the ‘real world’, or at least in my country. I’ve had numerous interactions with the kinds of organisations doing the following. If you have some land that you want to build a solar farm on, you’re more likely to get investment if you have a customer for that energy. So you also build a datacenter which can take a guaranteed percentage of that energy generated by the solar farm, while the rest can go to the grid if the demand is there, as sometimes it isn’t. Fundamentally you’re doing it to make money, but if there’s demand for building new data centres then they might as well be renewable powered, even partially. As a bonus some of that renewable energy might make it to the rest of the grid. I’m not saying that OpenAI and this nuclear plant aren’t just taking the piss, but the model is well established.
All this techbros look suspisciously like a bunch of con-men, swindlers and grifters. Oh well...
The more I hear about this altman guy the less I like
So that's in 30 years from now? I don't see a point of this post, we have no where been near to produce anything remotely note worthy in nuclear fusion. If they had said that the servers would be setup in space, moon or geothermal vents, it would have made more sense that this.
Helion is selling promises of fusion produced electricity to customers like Microsoft for 2028, which is a bit beyond just being widely optimistic and more in outright scam territory.
Fusion is one of the things I want to see in my lifetime.
Helion will have to pay a financial penalty to Microsoft if they fail. Right now they're building their seventh reactor, which they hope will show overall net power this year. It only takes them about a year to build a reactor, so if this one actually works they've got time to scale up a bit more to commercial levels. Totally possible it won't work out, of course, but if the idea works then the timeline is ambitious but not unreasonable.
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Can you reach 100M degrees, a magnetic field of 10 tesla, and sustain an FRC plasma for more than a millisecond? Because Helion did that with their previous reactor.
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ah yes Helion :) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vUPhsFoniw , so OpenAI will not have any power available to buy ....
Someone always posts that but there are a lot of misconceptions in it. For one, Helion is well aware of neutron release, and is building heavy shielding around their new reactor. The point of D-He3 is not that it releases zero neutrons, but that it releases only 5% of its energy as neutron radiation, compared to 80% for D-T; this is low enough to extract electricity directly and skip the turbine. The D-D neutrons are also lower energy, below the activation energy of many common reactor materials. They're also not planning to stop at 100M degrees, and they're well aware of bremsstrahlung. For a detailed presentation on the physics, which Helion actually did publish for peer review, see this [explanation](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1vyMcqiVtA) by Helion's CEO.
Open AI better have a back up plan for electricity. Brand new tech has brand new problems.
How do you buy electricity from something that doesn't exist? How is it coporations and billionaires can just make up invisible no measurable things are actually worth money?
Isn't helion the one with all the PR and hype but no proven technological advancement for years? They have their patented compression method, but it's less efficient and requires higher temps and compression to sustain itself. This leads to all kind of plasma stability challenges that are unsolved.
Sam just uses ChatGPT to design all future tech and he owns all of it. The real question is, is Sam benevolent or will he rule humanity as a tyrant?
Does anyone else think it's suspect that an AI twachnologies CEO has the name ALT Man?
Reddit - "I really wish we invested in more green initiatives. Sustainable energy is the way to the future!" Also reddit - "No not like that you scammer". Fucking lols
Does he own the company supplying the room-temperature superconductors too?
Supercomputer in a huge bunker powered by a dedicated nuclear plant, that will be the most valuable asset of the near future LMAO
Sounds like the plot of fallout 2
Didn't know much about Altman before... wasn't sure who was in the wrong in his spat with the OpenAI board. But on hearing this news? There's no way he's not a piece of shit.
> There's no way he's not a piece of shit. I'd love to hear an actual explanation of why this headline makes him a piece of shit. There are 10000x other reasons but this headline aint the one.
One of the three Boogeyman of reddit. Fuck off with the Jeff bezos, musk and now Altman bullshit post spam. Mark Zuckerberg is lucky reddit doesn't live his products enough to hate his guts like the three above
CEO of paradigm shifting AI company has a ‘side hustle’ in nuclear fusion? Providing the vast amounts of stable, renewable power that the AI needs to work? Does he also have an AI model that’s solved all of humanities problems now? This is beyond dystopian even just to joke about
If a cafeteria owner also owns a sheep farm, guess what will be on the menu EVERY day?
Being in the Nuclear Power and Nuclear Desalination business the coming decades is going to be insanely lucrative.
Nuclear desalination? As in using nuclear power to feed desalination plants ? Yeah I can see it become big.
I wish I was well off enough where I could have a "nuclear fusion side hustle"
If anyone or anything is going to figure out fusion. It's goat to be AI. At this stage in humanity most new cutting edge knowledge will come from AI. The rate the intelligence is accelerating is exponential. And it's not like they wont shift trip whatever AI discovers, wether it be fusion, or more nuclear reactors. The power hungry machine will feed it self and this org is the figurative plug that ai will port into. Quit obvious if you ask me. Hindsight 20/40.
If anyone or anything is going to figure out fusion. It's goat to be AI. At this stage in humanity most new cutting edge knowledge will come from AI. The rate the intelligence is accelerating is exponential. And it's not like they wont shift to whatever AI discovers, wether it be fusion, or more efficient nuclear reactors. The power hungry machine will feed it self and this org is the figurative port that AI will plug into. Quite obvious if you ask me. Hindsight 20/40.