Casey Handmer: belief

Transcript context

…You mean like actual dirt? Yeah. Actual dirt has plenty of silicon in it. For example, setting up a brand new silicon refinery takes about 18 months. But that's just with the current technology, I actually think we may find new ways. One of the nice things about having infinite free solar power, approximately free solar power, is that you can revisit a bunch of legacy industrial processes that have been optimized for efficiency and say, “Well, what if we just use twice as much power and we just want to do them faster and cheaper?” Less capex, less lead time, more power. Well, you can start solving problems. It turns out that if you want to chemically reduce silicon, you can do it electrolytically with less efficiency and under a hydrogen-rich atmosphere or something. One of the ways that silicon can be refined is by turning it into silane, which is a silicon tetrahydride. I'm not really a chemist, but I think that's right. So SiH4, which is a gas, it's actually like methane, but one down on the periodic table. Don't breathe it though. Once it's a gas, you can filter it from all the contaminants which don't form gases or can be separated by density, much like how uranium is sometimes enriched, but much, much less difficult. You then heat it up to separate it back into pure silicon where you can then precipitate out a crystal. The reason I think this is interesting is because whenever people are talking about the AI singularity, often their expertise is not in energy or physics or whatever. They focus only on the cognitive elements of the singularity, which is like how much faster can we make AI smarter, etc. I think this is really interesting. If we have unbounded cognition, which sets up both the ability to supply and to demand more energy, I'm very curious, what does the energy singularity look like? We're just trying to saturate as much energy that the earth receives and turn it into cognition.…

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