Floating nuclear power plants.
Packy McCormick on fusion, what it is and why it’s different now. In short: compute, machine learning and materials. That’s all helping fusion get to startup up speed and scale. Interestingly, there’s a wide variety of paths, materials and technologies being explored. There remain huge technical challenges, but a real of sense of progress–and incredible potential.
The head of the UK Atomic Energy Authority is looking to the convergence of supercomputing and AI to enable commercial fusion energy by the 2040s—an ambitious timeline.
Sodium-ion batteries–less dense and so heavier, with shorter lifespans, than lithium-ion, but potentially less expensive, too.
The largest single-day jump in share price, fueled by AI and chatbots, has made NVIDIA the sixth most valuable company in the world (Washington Post). Meantime, China remains a ‘very important market’ for NVIDIA.
PrivateGPT is here.
OpenAI crowdsourcing ideas for AI regulation, offering grants of $US100,000.
Generative AI is allowing users to reimagine world history: what if India ruled Great Britain, Mussolini coverted to Islam, or the Mayan Empire never fell?
Orlando builds a digital twin of the city and region using the Unreal engine. I note initial costs are usually given in such reports; I’ve yet to see update and ongoing model maintenance costs (and total cost of ownership, including data provenance, etc).
How TikTok shares user data (New York Times).
A Wired piece on the informal ‘Big Pipes’ collaboration targetting cybercriminal booter services.
Companies thinking about building on the moon. NASA is trialling the idea of melting regolith then using it as a building material via 3D printing.
How budget drones are redefining warfare (IEEE). Then again, everything old is new again: Russia’s use of Soviet glide bombs (New York Times). Drones in the AUKUS context.
Fascinating thread on low-background (radiation) steel. Chinese activity also reported here and here.
Lesley Seebeck 