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Comment by themaninthedark | Hacker News Reader

From what I read on the site here and on a Guardian article it looks like it is a modified Solar tower.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_solar_power#Solar...

I don't see where AI comes in at all.

I think the challenge is that when the sun is variable, you have to constantly regulate the manufacturing process to get consistent output. You have to see clouds coming and scale back the feed rate of whatever material you're heating in advance.

What do you mean by the sun being variable? Don’t we already know where the sun is going to be at anytime for the entire year?

Clouds.

Right, but if there are clouds in the way there’s not a lot that you can do.

This (otherwise PR-heavy) article on CNN seems to suggest they have improved on classical heliostats, which sounds entirely possible:

https://edition.cnn.com/2019/11/19/business/heliogen-solar-e...

They might have but I can't see it. It looks like they are splitting water to make H2. Quick search showed that there is a company in Spain that had done so since 2008.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_splitting#Solar-thermal

You keep citing that link without reading it.

You're referring to Hydrosol, an EU-funded prototype thermochemical solar reactor which produces hydrogen by splitting water (and using some of that resultant hydrogen as fuel to scale up the process to industrial temperatures).

That is not at all what Heliogen does. Both products are similar in the sense that they use concentrated energy, but Heliogen has more in common with concentrated solar power plants (like the one between LA and Vegas) than it does with Hydrosol.

Either I missed the chemical part or misinterpreted it because I thought it related to the H2 splitting.

> I don't see where AI comes in at all.

I get frustrated by the wide use of the term AI. What is AI other than, well, programming?

Even when I've spoken to devs who have have made game AI's or conversational AI's it seems that a lot of their work is with good 'ol IF statements and exceptions.

Somehow I had always imagined that an AI would be more like a neural net with an operational engine that didn't require exception based programming.

I agree with you more or less, my idea of AI is a program that when given input will not only respond but observe it's response and continue to modify it's response to find a unique (and optimal) solution. I think that this necessitates self-modifying programs but I am no expert.

I also think a lot of the trouble I have with the term stems from the ambiguity in the word artificial. Artificial smile vs artificial diamond.

The AI comes in as a way to make rich venture capitalists, sorry I mean philanthropists, part with their money.

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