[samsartor]

My advisor also worked on this ML project for estimating electron density and temperature within tokomaks: https://www.cs.wm.edu/~ppeers/showPublication.php?id=Ozturk:...

Technically that counts as "AI in nuclear fusion", but it isn't any sort of breakthrough. In almost every case the effects of AI are marginal. Not zero exactly, but nowhere near the breathless hype.

[vlovich123]

Depends on what you count as ML and what counts as AI and the distinctions are meaningless. It’s just that ML techniques have lost their magic and are now just part of the toolkit of how you do things. But I wouldn’t say they’re zero because you need a lot of wins all over the place compounded over time to get the true win. It’s a hard multi disciplinary project with unknown physics on top of engineering. It’s now known physics in some ways on the theoretical side but the practical physics of it and how to scale it up and make it work are not solved and that’s real R&D that has to be done. There’s glimmers of progress here and there, achievements we never had before but it all still feels so far away because it’s not coalescing as fast as the advertised wins might suggest.