In this weeks news, we learn that the reality of AI designed prescription drugs to tackle major diseases is literally just around the corner. We aslo learn from our GPT Universal Primer that nuclear fusion is much simpler to understand than I’d previously thought. Let’s dive in…

News

AI designed prescription drugs in a few years: in a far reaching interview with the New York Times Hard Fork podcast, Google Deepmind CEO, Demis Hassabis, claimed that AI designed drugs to cure major diseases were likely to be ready for clinical trials within a few years. Read all about it here.

Nuclear start up banking on AI power demand: X-Energy, a manufacturer of small modular reactors (SMR), small scale nuclear power plants, is looking to supply the ever increasing surge in power demand from AI data centres that have a huge appetite for electricity. Read more here.

Microsoft partners with OpenAI rival MistralAI: the Paris based AI super power, Mistral AI, has today announced a multi year partnership with Microsoft to take advantage of their Azure AI infrastructure plus give them scale to market. They will share research capabilities. Mistral also announced a ChatGPT rival, Le Chat, in beta testing. Read the press release here.

US & China agree talks on safeguarding AI development: in a welcome move, the US and China have agreed to set aside for the time being their differences on many matters of global importance to seek to find a safe way forward in the development of AI. Read more here.

AI predicts Alzheimers up to seven years before onset: a landmark study in the US has shown that by exposing routine clinical data to AI can predict the onset of Alzheimers disease up to seven years faster than currect clinical diagnosis. Read about it here.

Tool

I love this section of the newsletter. It forces me to go and look for tools that I might otherwise never find. This week, I have looked at a few, but the one that has given me most satisfaction is a GPT called Universal Primer. The essence of this GPT is that it will teach you everything you need to know about anything you want to know about! I have already had a few interesting chats about many topics. See an example below, following on from the nuclear power story in the news.

Prompt

Simple prompt: How does nuclear fusion work in principle?

Response: Nuclear fusion, the process that powers the sun and stars, is a fascinating and complex phenomenon that has the potential to provide an almost limitless source of clean energy. At its core, nuclear fusion involves the combining, or "fusing," of light atomic nuclei into heavier ones, a process that releases enormous amounts of energy. Let's break down this concept into simpler parts, using analogies to make it more understandable.

The Basic Principle of Nuclear Fusion

Imagine you have two small, super-magnetic beads. When you try to push them together, they resist due to their like charges repelling each other. However, if you push them close enough with enough force, they snap together because the magnetic attraction overcomes the repelling force. In nuclear fusion, the "beads" are the nuclei of light atoms (usually hydrogen isotopes, such as deuterium and tritium), and the "push" to overcome the repulsion (caused by the positive charges of the protons in the nuclei) is provided by high temperatures and pressures.

The Process of Overcoming Repulsion

For fusion to occur, the nuclei must come extremely close to each other, close enough to overcome the electrostatic force of repulsion between their positively charged protons. This is achieved by heating the fuel to millions of degrees, creating a plasma—a state of matter where electrons are separated from nuclei, allowing the nuclei to move freely and at high speeds. Think of it like heating a pot of water until it boils and turns to steam, except much, much hotter, and instead of water, you have atomic nuclei.

The Release of Energy

When the nuclei finally fuse, they form a heavier nucleus. The mass of this new nucleus is slightly less than the total mass of the original separate nuclei. This "missing" mass is converted into energy, according to Einstein's famous equation, (E=mc2), where (E) is energy, (m) is mass, and (c) is the speed of light. This conversion process is what releases the tremendous amount of energy in fusion. To visualize this, imagine if you could convert a tiny pebble into pure energy; despite its small size, the energy released would be immense because the speed of light squared (c2) is a huge number.

The Challenge of Sustaining Fusion

One of the biggest challenges with fusion energy on Earth is creating and maintaining the conditions necessary for fusion to occur. It's like trying to keep those super-magnetic beads together with your hands while wearing slippery gloves. We need to achieve and maintain extremely high temperatures and pressures, and do so in a way that uses less energy than the fusion process produces.

The Potential of Fusion Energy

If we can overcome these technical challenges, nuclear fusion has the potential to provide a clean, safe, and virtually limitless source of energy. Unlike nuclear fission, which generates long-lived radioactive waste, fusion's main byproduct is helium, a non-toxic, non-radioactive gas.

Before we dive deeper into the technicalities and challenges of achieving nuclear fusion on Earth, could you let me know how familiar you are with concepts like atomic nuclei, plasma, and Einstein's equation? This will help me tailor the explanation to better fit your level of understanding.

And so on it went. A short while later, I had a far better understanding of nuclear fusion than I had before. What would you like to learn more about? Ask Universal Primer GPT to get to the nub of it