"I got into fusion, spent a couple of years learning everything I could about fusion and all the typical approaches, and actually pivoted away from fusion. Kirtley was similarly dismayed by the seemingly impossibly time frames to commercialize fusion.
"The joke in fusion is that it's been 30 years away for 50 years," he said. "I think fundamentally today in the world, the two limiting commodities you see everywhere are intelligence, which we're trying to work on with AI, and energy, which I think Helion has the most exciting thing in the entire world happening for right now."īut Altman knows that fusion has been elusive for decades. "So for the same reason I'm so interested in AI, I think that fusion, as a path to abundant energy, is sort of the other part of the equation to get to abundance," Altman told CNBC. "With so much left to be proven for true commercial fusion approaches, coming at the problem from multiple different angles and trying to determine where the best pros and cons lie with individual technologies is exactly where the fusion industry should be right now," Rampal told CNBC. Overall, though, Rampal believes the wave of investment and innovation in fusion over the last two decades is good news for the industry. "An aneutronic approach, like Helion Energy is pursuing, could have potential benefits that other approaches do not, but could also have different downsides and challenges to achieving commercial fusion energy production," Rampal said. There are still unknowns with aneutronic fusion, Rampal said. Helion Energy is using aneutronic fusion, meaning "they don't have a lot high energy neutrons present in their fusion reaction," according to Brett Rampal, the Director of Nuclear Innovation at the non-profit Clean Air Task Force. "The systems end up being a lot smaller, a lot faster to iterate, and then that gets us to commercially useful electricity, which is solving the climate change problem, as soon as possible." "By taking this new fresh approach and some of the old physics, we can we can move forward and do it fast," Kirtley said. "I immediately upon meeting the Helion founders thought they were the best and their technical approach was the best by far," he said. Years ago, Altman had made a list of the technologies he wanted to get involved in, and artificial intelligence and energy topped that list.Īltman visited four fusion companies, and made his first investment of $9.5 million into Helion 2015.
(Musk has since stepped away, citing conflicts of interest with Tesla' s AI pursuits.) Altman has also been a big proponent of universal basic income, the idea that the government should give every citizen a basic living wage to compensate for technological disruptions that make some jobs irrelevant. It's part of a larger $500 million round that the start-up will use to complete the construction of a fusion facility near its headquarters in Everett, Washington.Īltman was the president of the Silicon Valley start-up shop Y Combinator from 2014 through 2019 and is now the CEO of Open AI, an organization that researches artificial intelligence, which he co-founded with Elon Musk and others. "This is the biggest investment I've ever made," Altman told CNBC of his $375 million investment in Helion Energy, announced Friday. Personal Loans for 670 Credit Score or Lower Personal Loans for 580 Credit Score or Lower Best Debt Consolidation Loans for Bad Credit
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