A math student has achieved the unthinkable. In just four weeks, Hudhayfa Nazoordeen, a math student at the University of Waterloo, has created a small homemade fusion reactor using parts he bought for $2,000, with the help of Claude—Anthropic’s AI chatbot.
Nazoordeen says he was able to build the reactor with “zero hardware experience.” To get started, he spent one week sourcing and figuring out all of the different components he would need to create the reactor. During the second week, he assembled the main chamber and the rectifier circuit. Once week three arrived, he was ready to set the entire thing up in his bedroom and then start tinkering with integrating the neon transformer that was meant to power it.
Halfway through that third week, though, Nazoordeen says he struggled to figure out how to crack the vacuum system needed for the entire system to work. He says that was the most annoying part of the project, and he eventually achieved it. The result of all that hard work was a homemade fusion reactor actually capable of creating plasma.
Nazoordeen shared the details of how he pulled all of this together in a thread on Twitter, where he credited his success to the usage of Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet, a powerful AI chatbot on par—or better than, depending on who you ask—with Open AI’s ChatGPT. Nazoordeen says he also called upon other engineers on campus to help sort out some questions.
He fed all the data sheets into Claude, and the AI was able to help sort everything out so that he could put it to use, building the actual homemade fusion reactor. Of course, it isn’t actually capable of inducing fusion at this time, as it doesn’t technically emit neutrons. However, the fact that he was able to build it in the first place—and do so in his home for just around $2,000—is really impressive.
Perhaps Nazoordeen’s accomplishment here could help spur the quest for limitless energy to new levels.
