I applaud this nuclear arms race. 22 minutes is really impressive for a technology that’s always been “20 years away”. I think I will do a deep dive on the technical challenges of fusion.
I also didn't see anything about vessel irradiation, which also never seems to be discussed. I get it probably isn't as big a problem as solid fuel rod fission in terms of waste creation, and tritium breeding may help, but it still will be kind of the same problem with LFTRs: a reactor design will fundamentally need an ongoing reconstruction/replacement strategy due to the vessel irradiation and transmutation from high energy neutrons.
Feel free to correct me if this isn't as big a problem as I think it is.
Cracking natural language comprehension with digital computers is an example from our field and it’s here.
Exactly, there are experts in the field less than a decade a way who said 50+ years easily. And there we are.
Not that it's not impressive, but LLMs do not "comprehend", for a start.
I don't think so. I am not setting the "goalpost" here, it was expressed as "LLMs have cracked natural language comprehension".
I just don't think they have. There are tons of statements I would agree with regarding what LLMs have achieved, but this one is not part of them :-).
How are we disentangling comprehension of natural language itself from comprehension of the subject matter being discussed via said language sample?
I think that by most reasonable metrics LLMs can reasonably be said to comprehend natural language itself. However they clearly are deficient in logic and reasoning, as well as comprehension of many of the concepts that the natural language is used to express.
No, it's not. It's just a legit illustration of somethings state of development on fundamental levels. It simply means "we have no f**ing clue how we can do this, but future..". This is different from something we have already solved, and you just need to throw money on it to scale it to whichever level you need it.
> Cracking natural language comprehension with digital computers is an example from our field and it’s here.
That's the point, everything in research is always x0 years away, until the breakthrough happens and it's finished.
We can already do fusion, and by every metric it is scaling. Triple product is increasing, etc.
Fusion does not become a viable source of energy until it scales beyond a certain point, but there is no "leap" between here and there that we know about, just better and better containment. We are descending a gradient, not looking for one.
If we had never managed to get fusion outside, say, hydrogen bombs, then I'd agree that we have no idea how to do it, but we have -- using many methods. Tokamaks seem to be the best one for scaling it so far, but there's other possibilities that I wish we would research more.
Technology usually has a range of performance, what it can do and what not. And our technology for fusion-process is not in the range for a commercial reactor, so we still need a breakthrough in our understanding.
But at some point the problem becomes not one of plasma physics, but of engineering and economics. Regardless of the plasma physics, the walls of the reactor can withstand only so much power/area and only so much cumulative neutron irradiation. Issues like this seem mundane and therefore easy, but they're perfectly capable of rendering a technology into a nonstarter.