"a few thousand days" is such a funny and fascinating way to say "about a decade"
Superficially, reframing it as "days" not "years" is a classic marketing psychology trick, i.e. 99 cents versus a dollar, but I think the more interesting thing is just the way it defamiliarizes the span. A decade means something, but "a few thousand days" feels like it means something very different.
I guess it makes sense, for deep-learning/LLMs to "scale to infinity" you basically need infinite amounts of power.
https://inl.gov/news/going-digital-idaho-students-engineers-...
the climate crisis + AI is the nightmare
But even if NIF had a reasonable path to energy generation in say 20-30 years, it still won't matter much, just like ITER probably won't. Solar will be way more cheap and widespread, it's costs are still dropping down ahead of all predictions, govt. or commercial. Fusion may just be a pure science project in the end, for a long time.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-09-11/openai-fu...
AI is prohibitively expensive. LLMs can take millions to train, and for Chatgpt 4, I wouldn't be surprised if the figure was in .5b to 2b range for compute resources alone. ChatGPT struggles for profitability due to high ongoing requirements for GPUs.
LLMs were a huge breakthrough. Gaining more funding and making experimentation cheaper will make the next breakthrough come sooner. Profitability will also come sooner.
We just don't know the timelines we are considering about changing.
Those are fairly substantial. It's past time to stop being cynical about "ten more years every ten years", but it's also way too soon to declare victory.
Solar already provides unlimited clean energy, and it took decades of development for the cost to drop to a competitive rate.
Even if we had a functioning fusion plant tomorrow, it will likely cost WAY more per kWh and require decades of iteration and improvement to become economically feasible.
I wonder if cooling is easier or harder in space?
It's harder. You can stop wondering.
It gets easier if you run things hotter, up to the point that there isn't much of a difference at a few hundred °C (and keeps making no difference when hotter).