Yep along with Fusion.
We’ve had years of this. Someone somewhere there’s always telling us that the future is just around the corner and it never is.
Yep along with Fusion.
We’ve had years of this. Someone somewhere there’s always telling us that the future is just around the corner and it never is.
Jesus_666@lemmy.world 1 day ago
At least the fusion guys are making actual progress and can point to being wildly underfunded – and they predicted this pace of development with respect to funding back in the late 70s.
Meanwhile, the AI guys have all the funding in the world, keep telling about how everything will change in the next few months, actually trigger layoffs with that rhetoric, and deliver very little.
FundMECFS@anarchist.nexus 10 hours ago
They get 1+ billion a year. Probably much more if you include the undisclosed amounts China invests.
Jesus_666@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
Yeah, and in the 70s they estimated they’d need about twice that to make significant progress in a reasonable timeframe. Fusion research is underfunded – especially when you look at how the USA dunno money into players like the NIF, which research inertial confinement fusion.
Inertial confinement fusion is great for developing better thermonuclear weapons but an unlikely candidate for practical power generation. So from that one billion bucks a year, a significant amount is pissed away on weapons research instead of power generation candidates like tokamaks and stellarators.
I’m glad that China is funding fusion research, especially since they’re in a consortium with many Western nations. When they make progress, so do we (and vice versa).