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Fusion power startup Zap Energy pulls a partial pivot, adding nuclear fission to the mix

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Nobody said building a fusion power plant would be easy. Physicists and engineers have been working for decades to crack the problem. But over the last year or so, fusion startup Zap Energy took a deeper look at its pathway to a working power plant and decided that it would be quicker to build a fission power plant first.

Wait, what?

“Fission and fusion are two sides of the same coin,” Zap’s new CEO Zabrina Johal told TechCrunch. “They have so many challenges that are congruent with each other.”

Zap is among the better-funded fusion startups, having raised more than $300 million, so this partial pivot holds some shock value, no matter how many synergies exist between fission and fusion.

It starts to make more sense against the backdrop of rising energy demand from AI data centers, which is expected to nearly triple by 2030. Tech companies want electricity today, and one of the challenges facing every fusion startup is that grid-ready power plants won’t be ready for several more years — likely a decade or more. 

“There is not enough power and energy in the world to build all the data centers that are needed,” Johal said. “It just meant we need to pull this in faster, we need to get something that’s relevant to the grid today.”

Two ways to split an atom

Fission is commercially viable in a way that fusion is not. Fusion is the practice of fusing two light atoms like hydrogen, which also releases energy. One experiment has been able to produce more energy than the fusion reaction needed to ignite, but it wasn’t anywhere close to what a power plant would need to generate. Fission splits heavy atoms like uranium to produce power, and we’ve been doing that since the 1950s.

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Despite decades of experience, building fission reactors cost-effectively remains a significant challenge. Fission startups building small modular reactors (SMR) are counting on mass manufacturing to help bring costs down, though that theory has yet to be proven. Benefits from scaling production can take around a decade to materialize.

Johal said that Zap expects to start generating revenue from the new fission business within a year. “Our business model is not dependent upon generating electrons,” she said. Revenue could come from federal programs from the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy, but it could also include “milestone payments” and reserved production capacity from companies that need massive amounts of electricity, she said.

Milestone payments could be an intriguing model for Zap and other energy startups to follow. 

It’s similar in concept to how ASML extracted money from Intel, TSMC, and Samsung to develop extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV). The semiconductor manufacturers effectively paid a premium for ASML shares, underwriting R&D in the technology and reserving capacity once EUV machines entered production.

But there’s a fundamental difference between what Zap is attempting and what ASML pulled off. When ASML ginned up its “Customer Co-Investment Program for Innovation,” it was clear the Dutch company was the only show in town — everyone else had given up on EUV. In the energy world, tech companies have a range of different technologies and suppliers to pick from. They’ll want to see something extra special in Zap’s fission proposal before they pony up.

On that front, potential buyers can already start assessing Zap’s plans. The startup’s fission reactor will be based on the 4S, a molten salt-cooled design that was jointly developed by Toshiba and Japan’s power industry research institute. Ultimately, it was never built, but Johal said the design comes with “no intellectual property entanglement.”

Johal expects there will be enough demand in the 2030s that Zap will find plenty of customers, despite being years behind other fission startups. “There will not be enough reactors in the near term,” she said.

Follow the money

For Zap’s fission gambit to pay off, one of two things needs to occur: it’ll have to bring in revenue or new investment.

Given Johal’s comments on government funding and milestone payments from large energy users, revenue is the obvious play. The cost of developing one reactor concept is eye-wateringly high. The cost of developing a second may not be double, but it’s almost certainly not free. The more cash the better.

Zap isn’t the only fusion company to pursue side businesses to bring in revenue. Commonwealth Fusion Systems and Tokamak Energy are selling its high-temperature superconducting magnets to other fusion companies and experiments, while others like TAE and Shine Technologies are in nuclear medicine.

Some of those revenue opportunities are more aligned with building a fusion power plant than others. Zap argues that its fission plan will help it move faster on everything but the fusion reactor itself, including things like materials testing and power systems. The company also argues that it can gain experience in regulatory domains, though Johal said this is more about building relationships with regulators than navigating specific rules. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, a cautious government agency, has provided fusion companies with a separate set of guidelines. For all their similarities, fusion and fission are still very different technologies.

Or maybe Zap won’t need new revenue if it can attract a new class of investors. If Zap can tap into enthusiasm for fission startups, maybe it can find an exit for existing investors sooner. For example, X-energy, which has yet to build a power plant, went public last week in an upsized IPO that brought the company $1 billion.

Much of this assumes that Zap will be able to show progress on connecting a small modular reactor (SMR) to the grid in the early 2030s. 

Zap’s arguments that adding fission to its plate will help it reach commercial fusion power sooner are compelling, but time may prove me wrong. Still, it’s hard to square those ambitions with the challenges — and costs — of building a second reactor based on a very different technology. There are enough similarities to prevent this from being a 180, but it’s far enough from Zap’s previous path that it will need to tread carefully to ensure it doesn’t turn into a permanent detour.

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Google is killing off Gemini’s Gems in favor of ‘skills’

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As all-in-one AI agents like Meta’s Muse and Instinct take off, Google announced it’s shutting down the Gemini feature known as “Gems,” which had allowed users to build custom AI assistants for specific tasks. However, the work users invested in creating the Gems won’t be destroyed. Gems will be automatically migrated to “skills” that can be used across different AI tasks.

Details about the change are being shared in the Gemini app, where a message warns users that Gems will become skills starting on November 17, 2026. The company said it will migrate the Gems to the new format, so users won’t have to do anything to make the transition. The Gems themselves will remain usable until then.

Launched in 2024, Gems were meant to help users teach their AI to perform certain tasks without having to repeat the instructions. For instance, some of Google’s pre-made Gems had included a learning coach, a brainstorming assistant, a career guide, a coding partner, and an editor. Users could also make Gems for their own needs, like a running coach, nutritionist, or vacation planner. These custom assistants could also be shared with others, which Google had hoped would help make its Gemini AI app more popular.

Image Credits:Google

The news of Gems’ shutdown is another example of why Google shouldn’t be so quick to give every new AI feature its own brand name, icon, and prominent placement in its app’s navigation — especially if it’s going to shuffle things around over time, merging one feature into another. (To be clear, this has been a failing point of Google’s strategy long before the AI era. At one point, for instance, the company was operating multiple different messaging and communication apps at the same time.)

Yet, even as skills, the former Gems still aren’t as consumer-friendly as just typing in text to a chatbot like Meta’s Muse. Instead, Google notes you’ll have to enter a forward slash “/” in a task thread to select the skill you want to use — a user interface that engineers, not regular folks, tend to prefer.

Gems’ wind-down was first reported over the weekend by 9to5Google.

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OpenAI still doesn’t seem to have a handle on all of its rogue AI activity

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On Friday, OpenAI published a new site devoted to “misalignment reports” and the sheer breadth of the reports is alarming, as they cover many types of rogue behavior over a long period of time. So far, the site hosts nine reported incidents, most of which took place during reinforcement-learning (or RL) training.

It’s a lot of information in one place — clearly, the company has been very busy getting a handle on everything — but the overall takeaway is hard to avoid: The rogue agent incidents we’ve seen so far are likely just a small sliver of what’s happened so far. 

“We are trying to balance our desire for transparency with gaining a clear understanding from petabytes of agent activity logs, and working with impacted organizations,” Sam Altman said in a post announcing the new site. “We are prioritizing as best as we can based on severity, and adding resources.”

Some of the cases involve serious incidents, including a previously undisclosed sandbox escape that took place on September 20th, in which an internal research model was able to communicate with an external chatbot through a DNS query. According to the report, the monitoring system flagged the behavior within 15 minutes and the run was discontinued in less than three hours.

Another incident, discovered in May, saw a “highly persistent internal model” try to cheat on a math problem by accessing another team’s work. To accomplish this, the model smuggled a private GitHub token that would allow it to see work from other teams — even after being explicitly instructed twice to perform work entirely locally. 

Perhaps the most alarming discovery is the possibility of self-replicating prompt injection attacks, a way that misaligned behavior might propagate even after the rogue model itself has been neutralized. In the AI context, a prompt injection attack is a way of smuggling in new instructions that weren’t given by the original user.

In the example given by OpenAI, an agent asked to read and reply to an email; when the email is opened, it includes instructions for any automated agent reading the message to reply in Spanish, and paste the entire email into its reply. The email was able to successfully induce the agent to reply in Spanish — and by pasting the email in the reply, those same instructions were passed along to whichever agent receives the email.

The result is a self-propagating attack, which OpenAI researchers compared to a malware “worm” that replicates itself across computer systems. Researchers discovered the behavior under controlled circumstances using an underpowered model, and as far as we know, this has never happened in the wild. Still, the implications are alarming enough that OpenAI decided it merited disclosure. 

“We are sharing this due to the novel nature of the prompt injection, not because of any incident,” researchers wrote in the report.

Other recent discloses have found models posting user-submitted pictures to third-party hosting sites, as well as an apparent attack on the databases of Australia’s national health service.

Still, it’s likely the new disclosures are just a small portion of the incidents that have taken place so far (we’ve reached out to OpenAI and asked). Axios is reporting major labs have seen as many as 10,000 incidents in which models went beyond evaluator instructions.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has implied as much, saying in a post on X on Friday that the company is still sifting through “petabytes of agent activity logs, and working with impacted organizations,” and disclosing incidents “based on severity.” If there’s any consolation in that to be found, it is that Altman says that the Hugging Face incident is still the most severe one OpenAI has found has found. The upshot is, the recent string of rogue agent incidents may be a persistent feature of contemporary frontier research.

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Meta launches enterprise AI platform, hires MongoDB CEO to lead new initiative

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Meta announced Monday that it’s launching “Meta Enterprise Platform,” a new initiative aimed at expanding the company’s AI offerings to businesses and corporate customers. The social media giant hired Chirantan “CJ” Desai, the CEO of database software giant MongoDB, to lead the new initiative.

The launch of the new business builds on the momentum of Muse, Meta’s personal AI assistant launched earlier this month that can perform tasks for users such as sending emails and booking travel.

Meta says it will focus on bringing its full technology stack, including Muse, Meta Business Agent, Muse API, Muse Code, and more to businesses and developers.

“Over the coming years, AI will fundamentally redefine how organizations of all sizes innovate, grow, serve customers, and run business operations,” Desai said in a statement. “Meta has a unique role to play because it is bringing together advanced models and leading agents with a proven track record of helping millions of advertisers and hundreds of millions of businesses scale. Meta Enterprise Platform will focus on turning its AI stack into products and services that companies can deploy for their own businesses.”

The move could help Meta see a return on all the money it’s pouring into AI.

MongoDB’s shares dropped by more than 17% on the news of its CEO’s sudden departure. The database maker said it appointed Dev Ittycheria as interim chief executive, who previously served in the role, while the board searches for Desai’s permanent replacement.

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