I mean, that's like science fiction in its own right.

That's right.

Absolutely.

Some of these, ironically, came because of budget cuts in academia.

If you look at Commonwealth Fusion, which is considered sort of the safe bet of fusion, if you will, if there is such a thing, that team at Harvard, their grants were struggling.

And so they said, why don't we form a company, you guys? And so they did.

And they're now the frontrunner.

What, self-enriching? Would the rubric, would the threshold for saying this is some sort of autonomous being be if it were, say, trying to mine Bitcoin for itself once it gained access to Hugging Face? Is that the criterion in your mind?

Onwards to the horizon of fission and fusion.

Okay.

Uh, let's talk about the atom and the power thereof, going back to the '50s or, uh, you know, retro future.

Uh, uh, this is a complicated slide, uh, for those of you who are, uh, just listening.

Basically, there's, you know, two approaches to nuclear fission, which is what we've been doing since the '60s.

The traditional one is big reactors.

And the simplest thing you can do to boost nuclear production worldwide is, A, stop shutting down nuclear plants.

Check it out at moonshots.com.

We hope you'll enjoy the episode.

Wonderful.

Thanks so much, Genevieve.

It's an honor to be here.

My first Foresight Conference was 2000.

That's when I met Chris.

And it's an honor to be back and to be able to speak to you guys today.

It has to be that

Do you think it's possible to actually build the orbital data center? Like, I, I don't think there's actually one that exists yet, but it seems like the math works.

It's possible.

The math doesn't work on a price basis yet, but it could work with Starship.

So look, a, a, a Starlink satellite doing internet is kind of an orbital data center.

It's, it's using its compute to handle telecoms and compression and, and channel hopping and so on, not for computing AI, but it has some compute on it.

And we've had the first example of a satellite launch that has a GPU on it doing that sort of thing.

So nothing says it's impossible.

There's, like, let's go build general purpose models and chase that general super intelligence, and then these narrow super intelligence pursuits really to me feels like it's a bet just on specialized workflows with industry-based knowledge or experts, and that's kind of where it sounds like you believe the value is.

So coming today where we have AI, which is at its best an amplifier of our best ideas to implement them, what is the role of open weights?

Well, look, let me go back in time before I come to the future.

I'll say, even without open source, everything is open source in the limit.

Because at the end of the day, IP protections are mostly, you know, societally agreed upon consensus hallucinations about how we're going to, you know, guard information.

But IP expires.

At the end of the day, you decompose what somebody else did and you know how to do it.

Robert Wright, an amazing journalist and author and so on, one of my favorite books is his book, Non-Zero.

Now and moving forward, how can we best complement each other? What is the potential for humans and AI together?

So what do you think is, is really the kind of core thesis or, or really the crux of the challenge for renewables, knowing that the case is, is very compelling for renewables and, and hyperscalers to, to combine [laughs] their, their powers, right? What do you think some of the core challenges are there in terms of, you know, regulation, permitting, market design? I, I would love to hear a little bit more of your perspective there when it comes to some of these more process-oriented elements of the energy reality that we have today, potentially serving as roadblocks to renewables playing a bigger role in, in the hyperscale build-out.

If you just look at time to build, uh, for a medium-sized solar plant or solar and battery plant, uh, it's maybe, you know, twelve, eighteen months to get it going, and permitting is usually fairly easy.

Uh, but for a data center wanting to get into the large load interconnection queue, it might now be five to seven years.

And so a lot of that is about T and D. It's bringing the, the solar, uh, or whatever the, whatever the grid is, is powered by to the site.

And so that's, like, the number one area that I'd focus on.

There's a second area though that I also, uh, think is worth, uh, pointing out, which is for gigawatt scale data centers, uh, we, you know, don't have a lot of examples of renewable power plants on that scale.

And so then you start to get into real permitting challenges and also challenges that the developers can potentially address themselves, just putting together large parcels of land, uh, to do this sort of thing.

Do you feel that we currently have the technology we need to, to serve this version of reality, or what kind of work needs to be done to get to that point?