The Frontier

Marathon Fusion said it had turned mercury into stable gold at a rate 10 times CERN’s 2025 record, though the amount was only a trace. Hosts said a 1.5-gigawatt fusion plant could produce about three tons of gold annually as a byproduct, potentially making fusion a future threat to gold’s scarcity premium.

Sam Altman outlined three possible AI endgames: an international safety body modeled on the IAEA, a CERN-like merger of major labs, or one lab using recursive self-improvement to gain enough economic power to “melt everyone else’s GPUs.”