The best part of this is I watched Sam Altman say he really thinks fusion is a short period of time away in response to a question about energy consumption a couple years ago. That was the moment I knew he's a quack.

Not to be anti YC on their forum, but the VC business model is all about splashing cash on a wide variety of junk that will mostly be worthless, hyping it to the max, and hoping one or two is like amazon or facebook. He's not an engineer, he's like Steve Jobs without the good parts.

Altman recently said, in response to a question about the prospect of half of entry-level white-collar jobs being replaced by "AI" and college graduates being put out of work by it:

> “I mean in 2035, that, like, graduating college student, if they still go to college at all, could very well be, like, leaving on a mission to explore the solar system on a spaceship in some completely new, exciting, super well-paid, super interesting job, and feeling so bad for you and I that, like, we had to do this kind of, like, really boring old kind of work and everything is just better."

Which should be reassuring to anyone having trouble finding an entry-level job as an illustrator or copywriter or programmer or whatever.

Fusion is 8 light-minutes away. The connection gets blocked often, so methods to buffer power for those periods are critical, but they're getting better so it's gotten a lot more practical to use remote fusion power at large scales. It seems likely that the power buffering problem is easier to solve than the local fusion problem, so more development goes to improving remote fusion power than local.

Sam is an investor in a fusion startup. In any case, how long it takes us to get to working fusion is proportional to the amount of funding it recieves. I'm hopeful that increased energy needs will spur more investment into it.

He had to use distraction because he knows that he is doing part in increasing emissions.

Fusion is known science while AGI is still very much an enigma.