All this argument actually says is that nuclear fusion is more promising than AI because nuclear fusion is more politically successful in getting funding. But (1) that routes through the opinions of politicians and laypeople, so it isn’t informative about the underlying technology, and (2) on top of that you’ve grossly misrepresented the scientific consensuses and the funding situation.
There is definitely not a consensus that Tokomaks will work, in the sense of providing practically-useful energy. And the relevant comparison to ITER’s construction cost is not the amount of compute spent to train a single model, it’s the total spending on GPU/TPU hardware by all AI researchers, over a time scale comparable to ITER’s construction.
There is definitely not a consensus that Tokomaks will work
Small quibble here. My point is that we completely understand the underlying physical laws governing fusion. There is no equivalent to “E=MC^2” (or the Standard Model) for AGI.
I’d also be really interested to see a quote along the lines of “tokomaks won’t work” or “ITER will not produce more energy than it consumes (Q>1)” if they actually exist. My current prior is that something like 99% of people who have studied nuclear fusion think it is possible with current technology to build a Tokomak with Q>1.
The physical laws allow us to get an idea about how hard nuclear fussion happens to be. It allows us to rule a lot of approaches as not having the chance to work.
All this argument actually says is that nuclear fusion is more promising than AI because nuclear fusion is more politically successful in getting funding. But (1) that routes through the opinions of politicians and laypeople, so it isn’t informative about the underlying technology, and (2) on top of that you’ve grossly misrepresented the scientific consensuses and the funding situation.
There is definitely not a consensus that Tokomaks will work, in the sense of providing practically-useful energy. And the relevant comparison to ITER’s construction cost is not the amount of compute spent to train a single model, it’s the total spending on GPU/TPU hardware by all AI researchers, over a time scale comparable to ITER’s construction.
Small quibble here. My point is that we completely understand the underlying physical laws governing fusion. There is no equivalent to “E=MC^2” (or the Standard Model) for AGI.
I’d also be really interested to see a quote along the lines of “tokomaks won’t work” or “ITER will not produce more energy than it consumes (Q>1)” if they actually exist. My current prior is that something like 99% of people who have studied nuclear fusion think it is possible with current technology to build a Tokomak with Q>1.
The physical laws allow us to get an idea about how hard nuclear fussion happens to be. It allows us to rule a lot of approaches as not having the chance to work.