Yeah it's 3E21 in SI units. The wikipedia graphs also highlight how nonlinear performance scales across machines. W7-X isn't 1000x larger than T3, yet performs ~1000x better. Confinement field strength (a little expensive) and major radius (very expensive) are knobs that turn these from research machines into power plants.

They do cooperate and Jorrit Lion, co-founder of Proxima Fusion, was studying in Greifswald for Wendelstein 7-X, also see https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092037962...

I have a rather specialized interest in and obscure subject but one which has a physical aspect pretty much any person can relate to/reason about, and pretty much every time I try to "discuss" the specifics of it w/ an LLM, it tells me things which are blatantly false, or otherwise attempts to carry on a conversation in a way which no sane human being would.

> pop culture conceptions of the Turing test are usually much weaker than what the paper actually proposes

I've just read the 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" [1], in which Turing proposes his "Imitation Game" (what's now known as a "Turing Test"), and I think your claim is very misleading.

The "Imitation Game" proposed in the paper is a test that involves one human examiner and two examinees, one being a human and the other a computer, both of which are trying to persuade the examiner that they are the real human; the examiner is charged with deciding which is which. The popular understanding of "Turing Test" involves a human examiner and just one examinee, which is either a human or a computer, and the test is to see whether the examiner can tell.

These are not identical tests -- but if both the real human examinee and the human examiner in Turing's original test are rational (trying to maximise their success rate), and each have the same expectations for how real humans behave, then the examiner would give the same answer for both forms of the test.

Aside: The bulk of this 28-page paper anticipates possible objections to his "Imitation Game" as a worthwhile alternative to the original question "Can machines think?", including a theological argument and an argument based on the existence of extra-sensory perception (ESP), which he takes seriously as it was apparently strongly supported by experimental data at that time. It also cites Helen Keller as an example of how learning can be achieved through any mechanism that permits bidirectional communication between teacher and student, and on p. 457 anticipates reinforcement learning:

> We normally associate punishments and rewards with the teaching process. Some simple child-machines can be constructed or programmed on this sort of principle. The machine has to be so constructed that events which shortly preceded the occurrence of a punishment-signal are unlikely to be repeated, whereas a reward-signal increased the probability of repetition of the events which led up to it.

[1]: https://archive.org/details/MIND--COMPUTING-MACHINERY-AND-IN...

Not really - at least at current goals, population size, etc -, even with the very high energy expenditure of, say, LOTS of AI hardware to run the "Skynet" we're driving ourselves into, we're talking the order of magnitude of 30TWh (human generation today per Wikipedia).

Imagining a future: with a ~3% growth, so let's say fusion is deployed and everything is electric in the next few years (not happening that fast though), with AI data-centers everywhere so individual-level AI runs (say "Her"'s movie personal OS-level stuff) per human and we reach the out-of-my-buttocks figure of 500 TWh/year in 10 years time, which is crazy shit ... well, that would not "boil the world"!

The Sun delivers ~170,000 TWh per year. So 500 TWh still would not be that significant, and within the Sun's yearly delivery fluctuations.

The problem with energy generation today is that it's releasing gases, and these gases are disrupting the planet’s energy balance - especially how Earth gets rid of the massive energy it receives from the Sun. We do need to restore the balance between what comes in and what goes back out - fusion can help tackle that problem specifically, so it's beneficial overall even if it eventually adds a fractional percentage to the overall planetary energy bill.

I picture that fusion would be a complementary source, not the only one, and, once/if deployed, would help close some of key the loopholes that prevent solar (and other renewables) from being deployed 100%.

So it would seem, but we could also air condition the world and beam the energy into deep space instead.

We'll be smart enough by the time we get it.

You can stop worrying, because fusion energy from this kind of reactor will be anything but cheap. It will likely be more expensive than energy from current generation fission power plants.

We have effectively unlimited carbon dioxide right now

"I remember when AGI meant being able to generalize knowledge over problems not specifically accounted for in the algorithm… "

So do we have that? As far as I know, we just have very, very large algorithms (to use your terminology). Give it any problem not in the training data and it fails.

> “ASI” will probably have to solve all of the world’s problems and bring us all to the promised land before it will merit that moniker lol.

People base their notions of AI on science fiction, and it usually goes one of two ways in fiction.

Either a) skynet awakens and kills us all or

B) the singularity happens, AI get so far ahead they become deities, and maybe the chosen elect transhumanists get swept up into some simulation that is basically a heavenly realm or something.

So yeah, bringing us to the promised land is an expectation of super AI that does seem to come out of certain types of science fiction.

You need to think of what happens if it's 0.001 cm too big, small, etc. Manufacturing always involves errors and engineering requires tolerances.

Doesn’t our engineering account for that? We never build things that need that level of detail in our tolerances. Like for example an airplane.

If the goal is viable commercial operation, Helion has vast benefits over the other approaches when it comes to the economics of turning the fusion energy into electricity.

All approaches have huge hurdles to overcome. Helion may have bigger challenges on the Q side, but all-in-all I think the probabilities of being viable ends up similar.

All other fusion power plants are thermal power plants. I suspect all thermal power plants will end up being economically unviable in the world of renewables, for various reasons. They’re just too bulky and slow, and require special consideration wrt cooling. It’s one of the reasons why gas power is king these days.

If we think really far ahead, the scaling of thermal power plants is limited by the heat they put out. It ends up contributing to global warming just from the thermal forcing they apply to the environment. The effect of the ones we have today are already surprisingly significant. Helion is a path to being able to produce a huge amount of energy with fairly limited impact on the environment (eventually limited by the thermal energy they dump, but perhaps they can use thermal radiation panels that dump the waste heat energy directly to space)

They've already demonstrated very high efficiency recovery of the plasma energy that they inject when the plasma is compressed. The additional plasma energy from fusion products would be recovered just the same way.

How isolated are the paths it could have taken? One major outdated choice ITER took is cold magnets, rather than "warm". Could they have switched this point in an iterative project?

this discounts the likelihood that other breakthroughs are correlated with ITER in some way.

The first transistor in Silicon Valley wasn’t made by Shockley.

They had to abandon their first approach because it didn't work in at least three different ways. And now they've had layoffs because additional funding didn't show up.

Aren’t they running out of money?