By January 2023, ChatGPT had garnered 100 million monthly active users about two months after its launch, making it the fastest-growing consumer app in history, with multiple trending searches. ChatGPT is an AI chatbot that can interact with people by learning and understanding human language, and help humans complete a series of tasks, such as writing papers, creating poetry, typing code and checking program errors.
Fig.1 ChatGPT Chat Page and A Trendy Search
The emergence of ChatGPT has set off an important revolution in the field of AI. It has attracted wide attention from users to investors because of its potential to unlock human productivity. Many investment institutions and technology companies have begun to deploy similar intelligent tools. For example, Baidu is reported to launch its AIprogram in China in March.
Forbes considers ChatGPT as a seismic event—on par with the launch of the Netscape browser or the iPhone. The founder and CEO of OpenAPI, the company behind ChatGPT, can be called legendary. Besides ChatGPT, he has shown investment interest in another field—nuclear fusion.
Fig.2 Practical Fusion Reactors—Ten Breakthrough Technologies of 2021
1. A Legendary Investor
OpenAI has always been at the forefront of the technology industry. Before Microsoft reconfirmed an additional investment worth billions of dollars in 2023, OpenAI has completed six rounds of financing and is currently valued at $29 billion. As the CEO of the company, Altman not only has superior technology R&D and market judgment ability, but also creates investment legends.
After two years at Stanford, Altman dropped out with his classmates to start a business. In 2012, Altman used some of the money from the sale of Loopt to co-found Hydrazine Capital, a $21 million venture fund, with investment from Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel and a number of billionaires.
Fig.3 The Location-Sharing App Loopt
Prior to devoting himself to OpenAI in 2019, Altman was the chairman of Y Combinator, one of the most known startup accelerators which has made successful investments in about 2,000 companies, including some big names, such as Dropbox, Airbnb, Stripe, twitch, and Reddit. As early as 2015, Altman was featured on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for venture capital at age 29.
2. A Focus on Fusion Energy
In addition to running funds, Altman also makes venture capital investments as an individual investor. In 2021, he invested $375 million in fusion startup Helion Energy, the largest investment he’s ever made personally.
“Helion is more than an investment to me. It’s the other thing besides OpenAI that I spend a lot of time on. I’m just super excited about what’s going to happen there”, said Altman. He added that he thinks a fusion race is great and feels happy that humans are building a low-cost fusion energy system that could provide the ultimate energy source for the planet.
Since 2021, a large number of investment institutions and entrepreneurs have entered the field of controlled nuclear fusion, including many well-known institutions and industry leaders. By the end of 2022, there are 33 private companies in the world engaged in the development of nuclear fusion technology, with a total financing of at least $4.8 billion.
Fig.4 Funding for Fusion Companies and Notable Investments
Source: The Global Fusion Industry in 2022
In November 2021, Helion Energy announced a $500 million investment (led by OpenAI CEO Altman) and an additional $1.7 billion in commitments tied to certain milestones; In the same month, General Fusion, backed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, raised $130 million; Less than a month later, Commonwealth Fusion Systems announced it had raised $1.8 billion—the largest single-round investment in controlled fusion to date, with participation from Bill Gates, Tiger Global, Google, and others. In August 2022, TAE Technologies, founded in 1998, scored a new financing of $250 million, with Google and Goldman Sachs as investors; Domestic fusion startups Startorus Fusion and Energy Singularity also received hundreds of millions of yuan in the first half of 2022. It is worth noting that the French fusion company Renaissance Fusion announced the completion of a seed round of financing of 15 million euros as early as February this year, demonstrating the increased interest in the field of nuclear fusion.
3. Nuclear Fusion Research
In December 2022, the California-based Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) announced that it has achieved a net energy gain in nuclear fusion reactions through inertial-confinement fusion. However, as the laboratory director suggests, fusion technology still has “significant hurdles” to overcome if it is to be commercialized, and could take decades of effort and investment.
Fig.5 Dynamic Demonstration of Inertial-confinement Fusion (ICF)
There are now three approaches to fusion: gravitational confinement, magnetic confinement and inertial confinement. The sun ignites gravitational-confinement fusion reactions with extremely high temperatures and pressure, which results from its prodigious gravity, while on Earth, fusion can be achieved mainly through magnetic confinement and inertial confinement. In the Global Fusion Industry in 2022 report, the Fusion Industry Association finds that 23 of 33 private fusion companies around the globe adopt magnetic confinement or inertial confinement, with few employing other related technologies (Only one engaged in muon-catalyzed fusion)
Fig.6 General Approaches to Fusion
Source: The Global Fusion Industry in 2022
Although the recent major breakthrough is made in inertial confinement fusion, magnetic confinement is still the most mainstream nuclear fusion realization method, from the perspective of the world and the history of fusion research. It is also the preferred method of private fusion companies. Specific approaches listed in the report, such as “field reversed configuration”, “stellarator”, and “tokamak/spherical tokamak”, provide further evidence, because they all belong to magnetic-confinement fusion approaches.
Fig.7 Specific Approaches to Fusion
Source: The Global Fusion Industry in 2022
With progresses in new technologies (high-temperature superconductivity, etc.) and new materials, as well as the flowing of private capital into the field of nuclear fusion, national research institutes and private enterprises will work together to speed up the commercialization of controlled nuclear fusion.
