Nuclear fusion is on its way
David Kirtley is the CEO of Helion Energy, a company revolutionizing fusion energy and bringing it to market in a truly innovative way. He interviewed with Lex Fridman recently and shared about a fascinating discovery his company made.
Nuclear energy is great because it makes an unimaginable amount of energy from a relatively tiny bit of resource. It hasn’t been the best system for efficiency however because it has to make heat that turns water to steam, the steam drives a turbine, the turbine generates electricity, and then the steam must be cooled back to water which requires more energy, or heats a nearby water source. There’s a lot of inefficiency in there.
So Kirtley and his researchers figured out that a certain method for producing fusion energy emits a magnetic field and electromagnetic waves. For those of you geeks reading this, you might already be connecting dots. Magnetic fields are related to and indicate the presence of an electric field. It’s how electromagnets work – the basis for a Tesla. In other words, Helion fusion generators may not require any mechanics inside the “reactor chamber,” which attribute to the greater part of the cost to build nuclear power plants. Rather, if the reaction itself produces an electric field, it can be captured “wirelessly” and converted to electricity on the grid. Pretty wild stuff.
I spoke for an Ai event
Yesterday I had the opportunity to showcase an Ai agent inside of n8n. For those thinking I just had a seizure with my hand on the keyboard, let me explain. n8n is a Berlin-based tech company offering an automation platform. Think: an engineers canvas for creating workflows where each node in the workflow represents a different online tool, like Gmail, Trello for productivity or an Ai “agent” connected to a LLM. Inside this canvas you can create logical workflows to get data where you need it to go. Better than explaining more, just visit n8n.io for more.
The event was comparing and contrasting n8n with OpenAI’s recently-launched AgentKit (AK). AK is built and offered by OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, so it uses strictly OpenAI language models. AK is however designed to be totally beginner-friendly and requires no special knowledge to begin using it. While I took reigns on n8n, a local friend and fellow entrepreneur, Phil handled the AgentKit platform.
We showboated a bit to simulate a fierce head-to-head competition and it turned out to be quite a fun event that I hope our audience enjoyed as well. For those interested in following along with this event series, check out StamfordAiMeetup.com.
Show and Tell
Are you smarter than a kindergartner? My son is in Pre-K and has to take something from home to school each week and show it to the class. Each item must fit into a gallon-sized bag, and before revealing it, he gives three clues to the class to try and guess what it is.
- It’s from New Zealand.
- It’s an animal.
- It has a long beak.
One of my favs on YouTube
During some relaxing time with the family over the weekend, I had the immense joy of introducing my family to OutdoorBoys. If you don’t know OutdoorBoys yet, well, you’re in for a ride! You’re going to love this guy. He’s goofy, he goes on epic outdoor adventures, and it’s a cooking show. His videos are absolutely addicting.
Here’s a video of him building a fishing cabin boat in his garage.