The fundamentals are fundamental for a reason. Don't go crazy with them, but triggers are great. (especially if you version control all your data definition language code)
Vertical on the curve of throwing money away for a share of the pie, but if AI gains are zero sum, then all parties will end up spending their profit on AI to fight each other, just like most companies spend more on marketing to acquire customers than to deliver their product.
And let's give it a density of the densest elemental metal (Osmium), at 22.6 g/cm^3
Assume the battery stores pure energy (I know, I know). So E = mc^2, which is like 8.99 x 10^16 J / kg
So that battery would hold about 22.6 g/cm^3 * 3.85 cm^3 * 8.99e16 J / kg = 7.8 * 10^ 15 joules = ~2.2 TWh, about a trillion times more than a normal AAA battery.
Doing some LLM-assisted sleuthing, a large cruise ship can use over 80,000 gallons of fuel a day [1]. A bit of searching indicates marine fuels have a density of approx 39 MJ/L (I'm using volumetric density for consistency), so 80,000 gallons * 39 MJ/L = about 1.1 x 10^7 megajoules = 3.2 GWh.
So a 2.2 TWh AAA battery could power that ship for 671 days.
Of course, the practical physics here are nonsense and there are obvious safety considerations associated with your AAA-sized nuclear weapon, but maybe that's what the author was getting at?
Exactly, I assume this is the kind of thing the author is thinking about. But going this far into the extremes of theoretical physics and calling it "hard, but possible" is silly on their part.
Energy density. This would be approximately 10^9 to 10^10 times the capacity of a real cell, would be better than fusion fuel, and almost 1% of the theoretical maximum.
You don't even need to be an expert to poke at why this is extremely implausible.
Think about the materials involved. What material stores all this energy, which one assumes is inert and room-temp? And if it's not inert/room-temp, what material contains the other material?
In each case, how much mass is needed of each - to store, and to contain? Noting also that the more mass you need of the energy-bearing material, the more you will need of the other. Can that mass be compressed into 4 cubic centimeters?
I personally have no idea, but it's sure sounding impossible.
The article starts that section with “As the Big Bang has so loudly illustrated” so I assume the author is imagining a machine that replicates the conditions of the Big Bang. Exactly how that could be constructed and used safely is left as an exercise for an AI.
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