The world-changing ‘killer app’ for AI could be nuclear fusion – The goal of limitless clean energy is now clearly on the horizon, thanks to AI accelerating research.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/08/20/artificial-intelligence-nuclear-fusion-research/
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From the article
>Although this is promising, the full potential of AI for fusion is just emerging. There are hundreds of billions of possible fusion reactor designs. How can we know which one is best for commercial fusion power? Finding the answer involves assumptions about the future energy market and construction costs alongside technical analysis. Building a commercial fusion reactor also requires precision engineering and aligned manufacturing. Analyzing a reactor design with traditional models takes months, making an exhaustive search impractical and slow. However, in the past two years, fast AI models are learning from and replacing these traditional models — reducing analysis time from months to hours. With AI, the hunt for the best or most viable commercial fusion reactor is on.
>Ultimately, of course, a digital solution is not enough; we must build a fusion pilot plant and generate electricity. This will require investments in the tens of billions of dollars, which is appropriate for a technology that will dominate the multitrillion-dollar-a-year energy industry. We also need to attract top talent, develop a highly skilled workforce and empower strong international collaboration — all of which will enable us to share and design new experimental approaches and techniques more readily.
*”Oh shit, the bubble is running out of steam…Fuel them more hype buzzwords goddammit, more hype buzzwords!”*
(Who knew that you can’t have exponential growth in capabilities without an exponential use of energy and data…If only we could have seen this particular problem coming from the very beginning of the AI craze…)
We know nuclear fusion is feasible thanks to those previous experiments, but being practical is a different matter. Not to mention considering most of the AI hype is replacing workers in more rote, mundane tasks, this once again feels like backers of AI overshooting with hype to keep investment money flowing.
Even the meat of the article admits that AI is not going to solve the problem of building a fusion reactor, but it’s going to need an immense upfront investment to deliver on its promise, one that if successful will completely upend some of the biggest industries and companies in the world.
AI processors figuring out how to keep themselves fed
So, instead of it being always 20 years away it’s going to be always 10 years away thanks to AI?
AI is good at some very specific tasks but the level of generalist AI required to drive research is nowhere near our current level of capability.
Generalist AI is just a convincing but often wrong parrot.
AI optimizing fusion reactor designs is neat, but we’re still gonna need an army of engineers and physicists to turn those simulations into reality. It’s not all ones and zeros.
Perhaps not so much AI as something like this [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolved_antenna](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolved_antenna)
if ai does it then it will have at least done one thing right