Unlike fusion reactors AI has a pretty convincing “demo” in my opinion.

On a first glance the output of LLMs and image / video generator models is very convincing and the artifacts and mistakes appear “small” for people that don’t know much about the technical details. So it’s easy to be convinced by “we’ll just fix those little bugs and be done in half a year” promises.

EV is a similar story: electric bikes and radio controlled cars and drones work great so it’s conceivable that bigger cars and trucks would work too with a “little” battery and motor tweaking.

Nuclear fusion though isn’t really tangible yet. For laypeople or seems there is no progress at all. Every now and then some scientists report that they can hold a fusion reaction a little longer or more effective but it’s not “tangible”. That’s probably also holding back a lot of investors which with all their resources mostly still seem to invest based on a gut feeling.