There certainly has been a lot of pixel ink spilled over Chat GPT, or OpenAI, or whatever incongruous acronym or nickname everyone gives to their autofill “artificial intelligence” monsters. That’s all they are, too. Autofill writ large. Instead of finishing your word, they finish your sentence. And your paragraph. And your very short essay, if you force it to. They have introduced a form of voting to the autofill procedure. The machine read (reads) the internet and decides what word would be likeliest to follow another based on every website’s bad writing and worse thinking. People somehow think this is going to spoil the internet. I have news for them. The internet comes pre-rancid. Way back when, Google pretty much destroyed the internet singlehandedly by demanding everything on the internet be designed for phones, and then search engine optimized to their standards — or else. There isn’t one website in 10,000 worth looking at anymore, and one YouTube video in 100,000 as a consequence. Ho hum.

The public face of this OpenAI “revolution” is Sam Altman, a strange dude that seems to be in the cockpit of great affairs for no apparent reason. His grrrllbosses on the board of directors of OpenAI tried to fire him recently, and found themselves on the curb instead, clutching a banker’s box filled with the tchochtkes from their own desks, waiting for their mothers to come pick them up. It’s unwise to wound a king, as they say. God knows who crowned him.

But I’m not particularly interested in OpenAI. It’s already being dumbed-down and bowlderized to accommodate the touchy zeitgeist, guaranteeing that its brand of intellectual margarine will never compete with my buttery writing, for instance. But Altman has his thumbs in all sorts pies, and one of them is Helion. And based on my very unscientific impression of this enterprise, I think it could work. And autofilling the entire energy grid of the world would be a bigger accomplishment than autofilling a recipe article for some Adwords site.

From the Wikiup:

Helion Energy, Inc. is an American fusion research company, located in Everett, Washington. They are developing a magneto-inertial fusion technology to produce helium-3 and fusion power via aneutronic fusion, which could produce low-cost clean electric energy using a fuel that can be derived exclusively from water.

Now, if you’ve ever seen Kirk Douglas feeling up Scandinavian women while thwarting Nazi nuclear programs, you know all about heavy water. Kirk plays a nuclear physicist in the tale, which is much less believable than the fact he’s doing it with one hand up every female shirt in the picture, but it’s still a fun movie. The Germans thought Deuterium, i.e. heavy water was the way to get a nuclear bomb.

But we’re not trying to split atoms, here, we’re trying to fuse them. It’s actually pretty straightforward to perform fusion with deuterium. Lots of people do it all the time. But getting more energy out of it than you put in is the trick. Helion’s approach looks feasible in this regard.

If you compare the scale and complexity of the things Helion is making in a big garage in the Pacific Northwest to the elephantine Rube Goldberg Tokamaks everyone one else is building at great public expense, you get some idea of why I might think this is practical, never mind feasible. Here’s a tokamak:

Come on. That’s a James Bond set, not a practical solution to anything.

Everyone in the industry is claiming that they’ll maybe have working nuclear fusion in forty years if you ladle another 10 billion soccer-dollars on the project. Helion is selling contracts for the electricity they’re going to make already. They say they’ll deliver a working model as soon as this year. They’re making these things in a glorified self-storage garage, using what looks to my eye like regular people to do the work. I’ve worked in factories as complicated as that, and I’m not too bright. The machine can make its own fuel, too. They’ve also pushed the limits of capacitors, instead of batteries, batteries being the ultimate logjam in electricity from anything other than goo and gas from the ground.

I can see lots of reasons why this might not work. I can’t figure out any reason why it can’t work. Big difference. Say, are you guys hiring? I could use open AI to design your next version. Unfortunately, it would look just like the last one, just filtered through the internet first.