AI’s Next Leap: Hyper-Realistic Agents & Unlimited Power | E2094

0:28All right, guys, welcome back to Twist. and I talk about why they're pursuing Z-Pinch technology in their approach to Fusion and how that's going to get us all the way to commercialization. I'm very excited about Fusion technology, not just in the AI context. And it's chats like this, they really give me the confidence to say, hey, we are going to figure this out. Then we're talking to Poly AI and its CEO, Nikola Mirstic. Now we break down how AI-powered voice assistants are taking on the customer service game and are changing it very, very quickly. So if you care about how AI actually interacts with the real world, how it impacts jobs, how it impacts workflows.

1:03That's the chat for you. We're going to start with our Zap Energy interview. So here's my chat with Benj Conway, all about Fusion and why it's coming sooner than you think.

1:29Go to squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, use offer code twist to save 10 % off your first purchase of a website or domain. And Atlassian. From MVP to IPO, Atlassian for Startups provides your team the right tools to plan, track, and collaborate on work. Head to atlassian.com slash software slash startups to see if you qualify for 50 free seats for 12 months. If you've been listening to Twist for the last couple of months, you've heard more about AI than I'm probably sure you ever wanted to. And one theme in that conversation has been enormous power demands.

2:02Because AI compute requires so much power, people are talking about massive solar arrays, de-mothballing nuclear reactors. There's a lot of fun approaches out there. But one that I'm personally most excited about is the progress being made by commercial fusion companies. We have a couple of these on our Twist 500 list, but one that I am most excited about is a company called Zap Energy. Now, I am not a physicist, have some in my family, but I was the family idiot. So I have brought their CEO and co-founder Benj Conway onto the show today to help explain to me how their approach to Fusion works and how close we are, hopefully very close, to seeing commercially viable Fusion power.

2:38So please welcome Benj to the show. Ben, how are you? Well, how are you? Nice to see you. Thanks for having me on. I'm good because I'm excited because prepping for this chat, I learned more about the different approaches to Fusion than I ever thought I was going to be able to. And frankly, I think what Zap is up to is fantastic and very exciting. But for folks out there who are a little bit less read in Bench, I was hoping we could start with just something basic. How does, from a very high level... The toroidal camera magnetismy katushkami... Oh, you're Russian so much better than mine. I'm so glad you said that.

3:10A toroidal chamber surrounded by magnetic coils. The idea being that you have big magnets to confine and compress plasma. And then bucket number two, which is build a big laser. And your listeners may be familiar with the NIF experiment, the National Ignition Facility Experiment at Lawrence Livermore, that achieved a scientific energy break even in late November 2022. So we don't occupy either of those two buckets. We use a twist on a well-known bit of physics called the Z-pinch. So Z-pinches were understood long before nuclear fusion was understood. A couple of scientists in 1905, Pollock and Baraclough in Australia, looked at a lightning rod that had been struck by lightning in some tin mine in southern Australia and saw that that lightning rod had been crushed down.

3:55It looked like it had been crushed down the length of that lightning rod. And that's because if you remember from high school, your right-hand grip rule, a current going through a conductor creates a magnetic field that curls like your fingers. And if you squeeze your fist, that's the force that gets exerted on that lightning rod. You sometimes see it in a science museum. You put a current through an empty can of Coke, and that can of Coke goes crunch under its own self-generated magnetic field. So this Z-Pinch was actually the earliest approach to fusion. And then what was the secret 1950s fusion program called Project Sherwood?

4:29It was called Project Sherwood because the guy running it was called Dr. Tut. The Z-Pinch was actually the first attempt. So the idea was they would take some plasma, they would put a big electric current through it, it would create this magnetic field, and it would compress and crush just like that lightning rod or that empty can of Coke. So the problem was it was like taking a water balloon in your hands and doing that. You know, it hit the walls in a nanosecond. And so these Z-pinch plasmas became unstable very, very quickly. And they then abandoned this idea and built magnets and lasers for the next 70 years.

5:03What we've worked out how to do is to stabilize that water balloon. And we do that with something called shear flow. So imagine that water balloon is not static, but is now flowing. And it's flowing in a way that is flowing faster on the outside than on the inside. When you're in fast-moving traffic, we all know it's very hard to change lanes into fast-moving traffic. So if you have this column of plasma that's flowing faster on the outside than on the inside, and ever sort of concentric rings going towards the center, and then you put electric current through it, it compresses just like that lightning rod or like that empty can of Coke.

5:40But when it tries to destabilize, it can't change lanes because the traffic's moving really fast. In fact, the traffic's moving really fast on all sides of it, and it compresses a bit further. And the traffic tries to change lanes, but the traffic's moving really fast. And so you end up now with a really stable compression that lasts for 10 ,000 times longer than that normal instability. So for now, for several microseconds, this thing is stable. And that gets to the point where you have fusion conditions. So on these two-meter devices that cost single-digit millions and that we can build really, really quickly, We're now doing fusion in a way that rivals some of the biggest experiments in the world.

6:19In fact, in the last 12 months, we published an electron temperature experiment result that really only a handful of fusion topologies in the last 70 years have achieved. We did it on something that you could literally fit in the chunk of your car. So going back in time, we've known about Z-Pinches for a long time. They were an initial approach to thinking about fusion. They went away for 70 years. You guys have brought them back and you think you are on, from what I can tell, the cusp of making them viable in a net positive power generation environment. So what's exciting about our approach is that the scaling is really significant.

6:55The relationship between the amount of electric current, so the amount of lightning bolt that we put through that shift flow-stableized Z-pinch, and the fusion reaction rate is an 11th power relationship. Meaning if you double the current, you 2 to the power of 11. So 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 ,000 times the fusion reaction rate. So it's a really strong lever. So what we've been doing really successfully over the last few years is driving more current through our shear flow stabilized Z-pinch, not by building ever-increasing complex and enormous machines that cost billions of dollars, but on that same small device where we can iterate really fast, driving more current through a shift-flow stabilized Z-pinch and increasing plasma parameters, for example, you know, neutron yield and other things that demonstrate we're getting to a hot, dense plasma.

7:43So I'm going to play a clip here from you guys that shows what we're talking about, I think, in a much more illustrative format than just words. But when you talk about your comparison to systems that cost billions of dollars, to me, what ZAP is building is kind of like the anti-ITER, the major fusion reaction over in Europe, because it just seems so much simpler, smaller, modular, and easier to tweak because you don't have to spend 20 years building a magnetic array that can bend space and time, you know? Why hasn't this approach been more popular, Bench? Because it seems very logical to me to approach it in this way because there's so many advantages from my layman's perspective.

8:21I believe that the reason that we don't have fusion energy has got nothing to do with the science. And I can hear my 160 scientists next door and suck air through their teeth, as I say it. But the reason that we don't have fusion, I believe, has nothing to do with the science. It's because we've been building these billion dollar experiments that take several years to design, several years to build, several years to commission, several years to do science. So on these 10-year timescales, we've been building these enormous devices where it's just impossible to rapidly iterate. So imagine spending a billion dollars on an iPhone prototype and building one iPhone prototype every 10 years.

8:59You would never, ever achieve a commercial product. To go from Windows 3 to an iPhone in 15 years, that kind of iteration just isn't possible. So it's one of the key differentiating factors of Zapp. It's our superpower, the ability to build devices with single-digit millions, So orders of magnitude cheaper, order of magnitude faster. So we can build a new device in a year, less than a year. We spend single digit millions, not hundreds of millions or billions, which allows us to iterate really fast. The fusion electricity that we produce is going to be competitive. And I think that's one of the things that the fusion community has largely ignored over the last 70 years, which is how much is this going to cost?

9:46And, you know, if fusion electricity or fusion heat can't compete, there's going to be one fusion power plant in the world and kids are going to go look at it on their school field trips. And they're going to say, this is a fusion power plant. It's not going to scale. Okay. Even if you think it's a bit overhyped, AI is everywhere from self-driving cars, medicine, and just business efficiency, right? We're all using it all day long. And if it's not in your industry yet, it's obviously coming and it's coming fast. You need to get ahead of this giant wave of computing. and innovation. But as you know, you're going to need a lot of compute power.

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10:57Right now, Oracle is offering to cut your current cloud bill in half if you move to OCI for new U.S. customers with a minimum financial commitment. The offer ends March 31st. See if your company qualifies for this very special offer at oracle.com slash twist. That's oracle.com slash twist. You're about to show an image of one of our devices. Yeah. So this is actually one of the things that helped me really understand the difference in the Zap approach. If you're on the audio version, I'll play the audio for you. If you're watching the video of Twist today, you're going to get a better show for the next 43 seconds.

11:28Let's look at how Zap Energy creates Z-pinch fusion within an experimental core. First, a puff of gas is injected into a vacuum chamber. As the gas expands, an intense pulse of power ionizes the gas into a plasma. Its currents and magnetic fields cause it to accelerate down the chamber. As it comes past the inner nose cone, the plasma collapses into a thin column. The Z-pinch magnetic field powerfully compresses the plasma for a few fractions of a second, producing extreme temperatures and densities. As this happens, a wave of fusion reactions produces highly energized particles, which can be harvested to make heat and electricity soon after the pinch disappears the cycle will begin again so i want to double click on the the cycle beginning again big yeah because i know that you guys are working on uh century which we'll get to in a second which is all about doing more and more of these pulses um and you said they last for uh the microseconds so how many pulses do you guys expect to have eventually in a minute time frame i'm not quite sure what the correct question there to ask is But how frequently do you spin the cycle?

12:33Yeah. So what you showed there is our fusion core. It's what will power the center of our power plant. But that's not enough. You need to surround that with something that then turns neutrons into electricity, ultimately. So what you see there is what our R &D team are working on day in, day out. what we've done in Century, which hopefully we're about to show, is really that first integration of power plant-relevant technologies that you need in addition to your hot, dense plasmas. So Century includes repetitive pulse power, this liquid blanket, durable electrodes, all integrated into something that is about the size of a double-decker bus.

13:17It's the size that Ultimately, it'll be in the power plant, which shows you that this fusion module is incredibly compact. But I think Century is probably the most important demonstration of some of these key enabling technologies around fusion that's ever been achieved by a fusion company. Sure. And it demonstrates, I think, also for that, our technology is highly differentiated, but our strategy of doing plasma physics alongside systems engineering is also highly differentiated. differentiated. When I set up ZAP, and again, I'm one of the rare fusion CEOs who's not a nuclear scientist, I'm not a nuclear engineer, and it seemed barking mad to me that the focus for 70 years had been on plasma physics only, and all of this other technology that you need to make fusion happen had basically been ignored.

14:06And I think people were hoping that Siemens or Hitachi would deliver it, invented it at some point. At ZAP, we've got almost as many people focused on these key enabling technologies as we have on the plasma physics side. And Sentry is a really incredible demonstration of those. So Sentry is much more than just the fusion core. Is it essentially a working, like for example, if you had perfected the fusion core technology, would the Sentry system you're currently building function as a power plant? Or is it still a portion of the pieces you eventually need to build this fusion plant you're discussing?

14:42So it's the first generation of all the pieces that we're going to need in order to do a fusion plan. So, you know, the repetitive pulse power with Century, we pulse every 10 seconds. In a power plant, it needs to pulse 10 times a second. Okay. Everything will need to be scaled up, but it really is the first. Actually, it's not even the first generation. It's sometimes the second or third generation of the pieces that are needed to put together for an eventual power plant. So Century was shown off last October when you guys also announced$130 million in new capital. It's a lot of money. It's been a couple of months.

15:16How has progress been on the Century project? Have you reached any new kind of key milestones that provide extra confidence in your approach? Yeah, we have. We hit a key milestone that we'll be announcing soon. And that meshes with a DOE milestone that I don't want to get too far over my skis. Oh, that is such a tease. That's brutal. And also on the R &D side, we're bringing on some really new, exciting configurations that we think we're going to push plasma physics pretty successfully this year as well. So, yeah, a lot of progress. When you're iterating this fast, it's really amazing how quickly you do progress in all of these different programs, whether it's on the R &D side or whether it's on the systems engineering side.

16:02Now,$130 million, it sounds like a lot of money to folks out there who have$130. But in the realm of big science projects, you've mentioned the cost of some fusion installations runs into the billions. So what I don't have a good idea, Ben, is how much money is$130 million for you guys? I know you've raised a little over$300 total, but does$130 get you all the way to commercial viability? Does it get you just through the end of the century project? I'm just not sure about scale of capital versus work to be done. We're probably the most capital efficient fusion company out there. So$130 million is worth a lot to us versus perhaps other fusion approaches.

16:39Are we going to need much more capital to get to a commercial product? Yeah. We're going to need several billion dollars, I would have thought, between now and launching a commercial product. Not because the fusion component of our power plants costs billions of dollars, but because Zapp is unique in that we'll be building our modules in a factory. So we'll get the sort of economies of scale that you get when you build a fusion module in a factory, a power module in a factory, some of the tritium cycle modules in a factory to then install them on site. Whereas other topologies, you're building almost like a conventional nuclear power station on site.

17:18With that, we are going to be building up manufacturing capabilities in order to be able to deploy and scale. And everyone knows setting up large factories for complex machines is incredibly easy. It doesn't cost any money at all, and you can do it overnight. Right. Yeah, exactly. So on the competition point, though, there's a lot of people out there who are doing cool stuff. I mean, I've been familiar with Tokamaks Installerators for a while. The Zap approach was new to me. I know Helion Energy is also doing a kind of a different approach to it. Do we eventually reach a point in which someone gets there first and then kind of owns the market?

17:53Or are we going to see eventually several different approaches to fusion power generation become kind of the norm around the globe, just like we have different types of nuclear reactors? Predicting fusion is really hard. I mean, I can't imagine. I don't know another sector where so many smart people have got predictions wrong over the years. So I predict humbly the fusion future. I believe there is room for multiple players. It would be like saying, well, one group launches a reasoning LLM and that's it. We just need one. There's going to be more. I do think that the idea that there's going to be, when it comes to commercial fusion, multiple approaches, I suspect not.

18:43I suspect there's going to be one way of doing fusion in the most economical way, and that will be the version of fusion that scales. I don't think we'll be in a world where we have Tokamak fusion power plants and Shiflow Stabilized Z-Pinch power plants and Stellarator power plants and laser power plants. I think there'll be one way where this is the cheapest, and that will be the technology that scales. But it's very difficult to know. Why do you have circulating liquid metal walls inside of the technology? Because that, to me, sounds like science fiction in the best possible sense as a big sci-fi guy.

19:21But explain liquid metal walls to me and why they're important. I'm just curious. Yeah, I'd love you to come and see it. It's really incredible. and I think Zap is one of the only fusion companies that's actually ever done these liquid blankets. You need something in order to interface with your neutrons. So a liquid wall replenishes. You can circulate heat out of it quite easily. And so it's the blanket and the material which interfaces with your neutron output. And rather than being solid, it's a liquid which has all the properties which enable that to as I say transfer heat and with complicated sort of thermal management that allows that to get hot and to breathe the tritium that you need in order to produce one of your fuels.

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21:13So here's your call to action. Just fall in love with Squarespace like I did. Squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, go to squarespace.com slash twist to get 10 % off your first website or domain purchase. That's squarespace.com slash twist, the longest running partner for this week in startups. Because they were a startup and they still build their product with the enthusiasm and the cutting edge technology of a startup founder. We love you, Squarespace. Given that my knowledge of thermal management is opening my gaming PC's case to let more air in, I'm going to leave the physics to you.

21:44but just to make sure I understand this, when the neutrinos are fired out from the Z-pinch moment of fusion, they're collected by the liquid metal, which then heats up, and then you can extract that heat from the flowing liquid metal, and then essentially do take that out to do thermal power generation. Right, exactly. So neutrons, not neutrinos, just an important correction. But yeah, exactly. Well, they're just different things. Exactly. No, no. Sorry. But you're exactly right. So you need to somehow get the heat out and you need to turn heat into electricity. And humans are very, very good at boiling water and spinning turbines.

22:28And so, yeah, everything from boiling water onwards looks very much like a conventional power plant. We've been doing a feasibility study on a decommissioned coal fire plant not far from where we are in Seattle. You know, obviously, you know, you burn coal, boil water, turn turbines. You know, fusion does fusion, boils water, effectively turns turbines. Everything from sort of boiling water is very, very similar. So we think there may be some efficiencies in terms of scaling commercially by retrofitting some legacy energy infrastructure like old coal-fired power stations. Well, if all power generation is just making a tea kettle blow, then why not just take your fusion power and attach it to an existing tea kettle?

23:11I mean, that makes perfect sense to me. That's the rationale. Okay, so Benj, I have to let you go, but I'm curious. When should we sync back up with you to see the next milestones you're talking about that you can't quite share yet? Just what's the timeline for the next big piece of Zap news? We'll be publishing later this year. I mean, we really believe in the peer-reviewed process. We'll be doing that more this year. But I would really encourage you to come visit. We'd love you to see what we're doing in person. it'll fulfill uh all of your uh preconceptions of what a a fusion uh a startup looks like um so look we'd love you to come visit later in the year and um uh you know we're we'll be announcing we'll be announcing some uh some progress not an impossibility given that i grew up in oregon and i have family on the west coast and i got to go see the um the uh the i don't know the student reactor at oregon state university when i was a kiddo so i've gotten to see some of the related technologies.

24:09But Bench, thank you so much. Zap Energy on the Twisted 500, one of the coolest companies in the United States today and at the forefront of fusion energy production. Thanks, Alex. And that, my friends, is why I consider nuclear energy very important, but merely a stopgap on our path to fusion. I can't wait. It's going to be amazing to have unlimited, clean, free energy. All right, next up, Poly AI and its CEO, Nikola Miršić, were talking about AI, but pay a special attention to the difference between conversational AI and generative AI, how the CEO thinks about it and what that means for the market.

24:44All right, let's go. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Twist. My name is Alex, and we have another Twist 500 interview for you today. Now, on the podcast, we spend a lot of time talking about models, new models, faster models, reasoning models, how new models are built, what they cost. But what might matter more is how AI is being used today in a business context. And for that reason, I'm really excited to have Pauly AI on the show today. And we're going to bring up CEO and co-founder Nikola Mersic. Nikola, hey, how you doing? I'm doing great. Thank you for having me. And thank you for one of the best pronunciations of my last name that I've ever heard.

25:20I did much better before we hit record and I kind of butchered it the second time, but hey. No, you did great. You did great. Honorable Serbian citizenship to you. i'll take it my country's going through some weird times so never bad to have one of those we've always been in weird times so yeah what a strange time we live in um putting aside uh geopolitical jokes though uh you are in london thank you for being up so late to record this no problem at all i'm excited about poly ai because i'm a big fan of i think where ai is going which is going to be me talking to it in both a personal and a business setting but i thought to start before we get into exactly what your company does and its history is to define conversational AI, because you guys differentiate that from generative AI in a very useful way.

26:04So Nicola, if you don't mind, can we just start there? Yeah, look, I mean, I think conversational AI is to do with using technology, AI or not, but really, it always AI to build conversational systems. So to build technology that will allow us to speak to machines. And then, you know, well, generative AI is just, you know, are using generative models to apply and applying them in different fields of work, right? So it's kind of, the question there is like, are you using electricity, right? So, yeah. So then I guess this is simpler than I thought, but I was going to ask when I do use, for example, just ChatGPT in the consumer context and I'm using it in a me speaking, it's speaking back to me thing, I'm using conversational AI, which is just undergirded or supported by generative AI technologies.