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Darby Dunn, the Vice President of operations at Commonwealth Fusion Systems.

Photo courtesy Commonwealth Fusion Systems

From March 2009 to December 2018, Darby Dunn held a handful of engineering and production roles at SpaceX.

“In one role in particular, my unofficial title was ‘Mother of Dragons,'” Dunn told CNBC in an interview in Devens, Massachusetts. “In that role, I was leading the build out of our new manufacturing facilities for the crew Dragon vehicle.”

While she was overseeing production of the Dragon spacecraft, SpaceX went from ramping up production to making its very first spacecraft, and then to sending cargo to the International Space Station on it regularly, Dunn says.

Building rockets is a very cool thing to do. But in January 2019, Dunn started work at Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a startup that is attempting to commercialize nuclear fusion as an energy source. Fusion is the way the sun and the stars make energy. If it can be harnessed here on Earth, it would provide virtually unlimited clean energy.

But so far, fusion at scale remains in the realm of science fiction.

Darby Dunn with the SpaceX Dragon rocket.

Photo courtesy Darby Dunn

Dunn says she made the switch from building rockets to working on making fusion energy a reality because she wants to see the impact of her efforts in her lifetime.

“I very much believe SpaceX will make life multiplanetary. I don’t know how much of that I’ll see in my lifetime,” Dunn, 37, told CNBC at the end of May.

But Dunn has spent large chunks of her life living in California, where SpaceX is based, and has very much seen the effects of climate change in the shape of wildfires and mudslides stemming from extreme rain.

“For me, it really came down to wanting to use my energy to clean up the planet instead of get off it. So that was the the huge shift for me to come to CFS,” Dunn told CNBC.

Joining Commonwealth Fusion Systems in the early stages, as its 10th employee, has allowed her to see a different stage on the journey of company growth, too.

“We’re a 5-year-old company with 500 employees,” Dunn told CNBC. “I joined SpaceX when it was 6 years old with about 500 employees. So I’ve actually been able to see the entire era that I didn’t get to experience at SpaceX and doing so at CFS.”

The Commonwealth Fusion Systems campus in Devens, Mass.

Photo courtesy Commonwealth Fusion Systems

A key difference between the two jobs is the maturity of the respective industries.

“The aerospace industry has been around for a long time. So building a rocket engine, the mechanics of it look really similar, or the structure itself, or the physics of how it works is all very, very well studied and very well understood,” Dunn told CNBC.

Fusion machines have been studied in academic settings and research labs since the early 1950s, but the entire industry is just at the very first stages of trying to prove that the science can have commercial applications. It’s being a part of that excitement that was a big draw for Dunn.

Of course, there are plenty of skeptics who say the industry is the equivalent of Don Quixote tilting at his windmills. But Dunn says her time at SpaceX prepared her to face the skeptics.

“When Elon said publicly that we were going to launch and land rockets back from space, everybody said, ‘That’s not possible! You can’t do it!'” Dunn said, referencing SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. SpaceX’s response was that the laws of physics say it is possible and so they were going to prove it, Dunn told CNBC.

“It took many attempts, a lot of learning, a lot of iterations on our software, many failed attempts off the boat — and then we did it. And then we did it again. And we did it again. And we did it again,” she said.

Darby Dunn, vice president of operations at Commonwealth Fusion Systems.

Photo courtesy Commonwealth Fusion Systems

“Now it’s gotten to the point where you’ve seen the aerospace industry shift to say, ‘Well, why aren’t these other companies also lending their rockets back from space?’ It’s completely changed the way that people are looking at it. They first said, ‘It wasn’t possible. Then, ‘OK, it is possible.’ And now it is saying, ‘Well, why isn’t everybody else jumping in?'”

Dunn is looking to be part of that kind of transition for the fusion industry at Commonwealth.

Speed is key

Dunn is the vice president of operations, which covers manufacturing, safety, quality and facilities. She’s helping Commonwealth make the transition from research and development-scale processes to manufacturing and full-scale production.

The company spun out of research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the company’s goal is to build 10,000 fusion power plants around the world by 2050, Dunn told CNBC.

First, however, Commonwealth has to prove that it can generate more energy in its fusion reactor than is necessary to get the reaction started, a key threshold for the fusion industry called “ignition.” To do that, the company is currently building its SPARC tokamak — a device that will help contain and control the fusion reaction. The company plans to turn it on in 2025 and demonstrate net energy shortly thereafter.

To build SPARC, Commonwealth needs to make a lot of magnets using high-temperature superconducting tape.

The advanced manufacturing facility located at the Commonwealth Fusion Systems campus in Devens, Massachusetts, where magnets are manufactured.

Photo courtesy Commonwealth Fusion Systems

“The cool part of this building is that the concept for it started out as a doodle that I made on a whiteboard three years ago,” Dunn told CNBC. “To see the steel beams going up, walls going up, concrete getting poured, it’s a whole vision coming to life, which is super exciting.”

To fund the construction, Commonwealth has raised more than $2 billion from investors including Bill Gates, Google, Khosla Ventures and Lowercarbon Capital.

Even as Commonwealth is figuring out how to make one magnet, Dunn is leading her team to develop manufacturing processes that can eventually scale to a process that looks like an automotive assembly line, she told CNBC.

Moving fast is a priority for Dunn, and the rest of the team. After building the demonstration fusion machine, SPARC, the company aims to build a bigger version called ARC, which it says is going to deliver electricity to the grid. The aim is to have ARC online in the 2030s.

“The biggest thing I think about a lot is time, about how fast can we go,” Dunn told CNBC. “The sooner we can get the magnets built, the sooner we can build SPARC, the sooner we can turn it on, the sooner we can get in net energy, the sooner we get to our first ARC. So I think that’s probably the element that I think about the most.”

Darby Dunn in the Commonwealth Fusion Systems advanced manufacturing facility.

Photo courtesy Commonwealth Fusion Systems

Speed matters because critics argue that it will take too long to get fusion to work as an energy source to meaningfully contribute to the very urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Top climate scientists at the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have said that to have “no or limited” overshoot of the 1.5 degrees Celsius warming above preindustrial levels will require a 45% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions by 2030 compared to 2010 levels and hitting net zero around 2050.

“I have asked myself, ‘Why am I doing fusion as opposed to something that is going to be deployed next year?'” she told CNBC. “For me, it comes down to the fact that fusion is the most energy dense reaction in our solar system.”

But she does not believe fusion should be the only solution.

“I very much believe in in solar power and wind and a lot of other renewables — that we absolutely need those. We need those deployed now. We need those deployed all over the world,” Dunn told CNBC. “But I don’t think they will be enough to get us to 2050 and beyond.”

Electric cars, heat pumps, green steel and green cement all depend on having large quantities of clean electricity. Its Dunn’s focus to build the energy sources that the world will need in the decades and centuries to come.

If Commonwealth is going to deliver that solution, though, Dunn first has to make a whole lot of very high-powered magnets.

“My own personal opinion is I’m going to keep on keeping on — keep on building. And we have a poster in the back stairwell that says, ‘Keep calm and fuse on,” Dunn told CNBC. “Regardless of what the outside world is saying, we are working every day towards our mission of getting net-positive energy from fusion. And I look forward to proving that to the world in a couple of years.”

U.S. fusion breakthrough could change world's energy future

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Ether and related stocks gain amid the latest crypto craze: Tokenization

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Ether and related stocks gain amid the latest crypto craze: Tokenization

A representation of cryptocurrency Ethereum is placed on a PC motherboard in this illustration taken on June 16, 2023.

Dado Ruvic | Reuters

Stocks tied to the price of ether, better known as ETH, were higher on Wednesday, reflecting renewed enthusiasm for the crypto asset amid a surge of interest in stablecoins and tokenization.

BitMine Immersion Technologies, a bitcoin miner that announced plans this week to make ETH its primary treasury reserve asset, jumped about 20%. It’s gained more than 1,000% since the announcement. Betting platform SharpLink Gaming, which has also initiated an ETH treasury strategy, added more than 11%. Bit Digital, which last week exited bitcoin mining to focus on its ETH treasury and staking plans, jumped more than 6%.

“We’re finally at the point where real use cases are emerging, and stablecoins have been the first version of that at scale but they’re going to open the door to a much bigger story around tokenizing other assets and using digital assets in new ways,” Devin Ryan, head of financial technology research at Citizens.

On Tuesday, as bitcoin ETFs snapped a 15-day streak of inflows, ether ETFs saw $40 million in inflows led by BlackRock’s iShares Ethereum Trust. ETH ETFs came back to life in June after much concern that they were becoming zombie funds.

The price of the coin itself was last higher by 5%, according to Coin Metrics, though it’s still down 24% this year.

Ethereum has been struggling with an identity crisis fueled by uncertainty about the network’s value proposition, weaker revenue since its last big technical upgrade and increasing competition from Solana. Market volatility, driven by geopolitical uncertainty this year, has not helped.

The Ethereum network’s smart contracts capability makes it a prominent platform for the tokenization of traditional assets, which includes U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoins. Fundstrat’s Tom Lee this week called Ethereum “the backbone and architecture” of stablecoins. Both Tether (USDT) and Circle‘s USD Coin (USDC) are issued on the network.

Fundstrat's Tom Lee on being named chairman of BitMine Immersion Technologies

BlackRock’s tokenized money market fund (known as BUIDL, which stands for USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund) also launched on Ethereum last year before expanding to other blockchain networks.

Tokenization is the process of issuing digital representations on a blockchain network of publicly traded securities, real world assets or any other form of value. Holders of tokenized assets don’t have outright ownership of the assets themselves.

The latest wave of interest in ETH-related assets follows an announcement by Robinhood this week that it will enable trading of tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs across Europe, after a groundswell of interest in stablecoins throughout June following Circle’s IPO and the Senate passage of its proposed stablecoin bill, the GENIUS Act.

Ether, which turns 10 years old at the end of July, is sitting about 75% off its all-time high.

Don’t miss these cryptocurrency insights from CNBC Pro:

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China’s Honor launches new challenge to Samsung with thin foldable smartphone and a big battery

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China's Honor launches new challenge to Samsung with thin foldable smartphone and a big battery

Honor launched the Honor Magic V5 on Wednesday July 2, as it looks to challenge Samsung in the foldable space.

Honor

Honor on Wednesday touted the slimness and battery capacity of its newly launched thin foldable phone, as it lays down a fresh challenge to market leader Samsung.

The Honor Magic V5 goes will initially go on sale in China, but the Chinese tech firm will likely bring the device to international markets later this year.

The company, which spun off from Chinese tech giant Huawei in 2020, is looking to stand out from rivals with key features of the Magic V5, like artificial intelligence, battery and size.

Honor said the Magic V5 is 8.8 mm to 9mm when folded, depending on the color choice. The phone’s predecessor, the Magic V3 — Honor skipped the Magic V4 name — was 9.2 mm when folded. Honor said the Magic V5 weighs 217 grams to 222 grams, again, depending on the color model. The previous version was 226 grams.

In China, Honor will launch a special 1 terabyte storage size version of the Magic V5, which it says will have a battery capacity of more than 6000 milliampere-hour — among the highest for foldable phones.

Honor has tried hard to tout these features, as competition in foldables ramps up, even as these types of devices have a very small share of the overall smartphone market.

Honor vs. Samsung

Foldables represented less than 2% of the overall smartphone market in 2024, according to International Data Corporation. Samsung was the biggest player with 34% market share followed by Huawei with just under 24%, IDC added. Honor took the fourth spot with a nearly 11% share.

Honor is looking to get a head start on Samsung, which has its own foldable launch next week on July 9.

Francisco Jeronimo, a vice president at the International Data Corporation, said the Magic V5 is a strong offering from Honor.

“This is the dream foldable smartphone that any user who is interested in this category will think of,” Jeronimo told CNBC, pointing to features such as the battery.

“This phone continues to push the bar forward, and it will challenge Samsung as they are about to launch their seventh generation of foldable phones,” he added.

The thinness of a foldable phone has become a battleground for smartphone makers to appeal to consumers who want the large screen size the device has to offer without extra weight.

At its event next week, Samsung is expected to release a foldable that is thinner than its predecessor and could come close to challenging Honor’s offering by way of size, analysts said. If that happens, then Honor will be facing more competition, especially against Samsung, which has a bigger global footprint.

“The biggest challenge for Honor is the brand equity and distribution reach vs Samsung, where the Korean vendor has the edge,” Neil Shah, co-founder of Counterpoint Research, told CNBC.

Honor’s push into international markets beyond China is still fairly young, with the company looking to build up its brand.

“Further, if Samsung catches up with a thinner form-factor in upcoming iterations, as it has been the real pioneer in foldables with its vertical integration expertise from displays to batteries, the differentiating factor might narrow for Honor,” Shah added.

Vertical integration refers to when a company owns several parts of a product’s supply chain. Samsung has a display and battery business which provides the components for its foldables.

Honor talks up AI

Smartphone players, including Honor, have also looked to stand out via the AI features available on their device.

In March, Honor pledged a $10 billion investment in AI over the next five years, with part of that going toward the development of next-generation agents that are seen as more advanced personal assistants.

Honor said its AI assistant Yoyo can interact with other AI models, such as those created by DeepSeek and Alibaba in China, to create presentation decks.

The company also flagged its AI agent can hail a taxi ride across multiple apps in China, automatically accepting the quickest ride to arrive? and cancelling the rest.

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AI virtual personality YouTubers, or ‘VTubers,’ are earning millions

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AI virtual personality YouTubers, or ‘VTubers,’ are earning millions

One of the most popular gaming YouTubers is named Bloo, and has bright blue wavy hair and dark blue eyes. But he isn’t a human — he’s a fully virtual personality powered by artificial intelligence.

“I’m here to keep my millions of viewers worldwide entertained and coming back for more,” said Bloo in an interview with CNBC. “I’m all about good vibes and engaging content. I’m built by humans, but boosted by AI.”

Bloo is a virtual YouTuber, or VTuber, who has built a massive following of 2.5 million subscribers and more than 700 million views through videos of him playing popular games like Grand Theft Auto, Roblox and Minecraft. VTubers first gained traction in Japan in the 2010s. Now, advances in AI are making it easier than ever to create VTubers, fueling a new wave of virtual creators on YouTube.

The virtual character – whose bright colors and 3D physique look like something out of a Pixar film or the video game Fortnite – was created by Jordi van den Bussche, a long time YouTuber also known as kwebbelkop. Van den Bussche created Bloo after finding himself unable to keep up with the demands of content creation. The work no longer matched the output.

“Turns out, the flaw in this equation is the human, so we need to somehow remove the human,” said van den Bussche, a 29-year old from Amsterdam, in an interview. “The only logical way was to replace the human with either a photorealistic person or a cartoon. The VTuber was the only option, and that’s where Bloo came from.”

Jordi Van Den Bussche, YouTuber known as Kwebbelkop.

Courtesy: Jordi Van Den Bussche

Bloo has already generated more than seven figures in revenue, according to van den Bussche. Many VTubers like Bloo are “puppeteered,” meaning a human controls the character’s voice and movements in real time using motion capture or face-tracking technology. Everything else, from video thumbnails to voice dubbing in other languages, is handled by AI technology from ElevenLabs, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude. Van den Bussche’s long-term goal is for Bloo’s entire personality and content creation process to be run by AI.

Van den Bussche has already tested fully AI-generated videos on Bloo’s channel, but says the results have not yet been promising. The content doesn’t perform as well because the AI still lacks the intuition and creative instincts of a human, he said. 

“When AI can do it better, faster or cheaper than humans, that’s when we’ll start using it permanently,” van den Bussche said.

The technology might not be far away.

Startup Hedra offers a product that uses AI technology to generate videos that are up to five minutes long. It raised $32 million in a funding round in May led by Andreessen Horowitz’s Infrastructure fund.

Hedra’s product, Character-3, allows users to create AI-generated characters for videos and can add dialogue and other characteristics. CEO Michael Lingelbach told CNBC Hedra is working on a product that will allow users to create self-sustaining, fully-automated characters.

Hedra’s product Character-3 allows users to make figures powered by AI that can be animated in real-time.

Hedra

“We’re doing a lot of research accelerating models like Character-3 to real time, and that’s going to be a really good fit for VTubers,” Lingelbach said. 

Character-3’s technology is already being used by a growing number of creators who are experimenting with new formats, and many of their projects are going viral. One of those is comedian Jon Lajoie’s Talking Baby Podcast, which features a hyper-realistic animated baby talking into a microphone. Another is Milla Sofia, a virtual singer and artist whose AI-generated music videos attract thousands of views. 

Talking Baby Podcast

Source: Instagram | Talking Baby Podcast

These creators are using Character-3 to produce content that stands out on social media, helping them reach wide audiences without the cost and complexity of traditional production.

AI-generated video is a rapidly evolving technology that is reshaping how content is made and shared online, making it easier than ever to produce high-quality video without cameras, actors or editing software. In May, Google announced Veo 3, a tool that creates AI-generated videos with audio.

Google said it uses a subset of YouTube content to train Veo 3, CNBC reported in June. While many creators said they were unaware of the training, experts said it has the potential to create an intellectual property crisis on the platform.

Faceless AI YouTubers

Creators are increasingly finding profitable ways to capitalize on the generative AI technology ushered in by the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022.

One growing trend is the rise of faceless AI channels. These are run by creators who use these tools to produce videos with artificially generated images and voiceover that can sometimes earn thousands of dollars a month without them ever appearing on camera.

“My goal is to scale up to 50 channels, though it’s getting harder because of how YouTube handles new channels and trust scores,” said GoldenHand, a Spain-based creator who declined to share his real name.

Working with a small team, GoldenHand said he publishes up to 80 videos per day across his network of channels. Some maintain a steady few thousand views per video while others might suddenly go viral and rack up millions of views, mostly to an audience of those over the age of 65.

GoldenHand said his content is audio-driven storytelling. He describes his YouTube videos as audiobooks that are paired with AI-generated images and subtitles. Everything after the initial idea is created entirely by AI.

He recently launched a new platform, TubeChef, which gives creators access to his system to automatically generate faceless AI videos starting at $18 a month.

“People think using AI means you’re less creative, but I feel more creative than ever,” he said. “Coming up with 60 to 80 viral video ideas a day is no joke. The ideation is where all the effort goes now.”

AI Slop

As AI-generated content becomes more common online, concerns about its impact are growing. Some users worry about the spread of misinformation, especially as it becomes easier to generate convincing but entirely AI-fabricated videos.

“Even if the content is informative and someone might find it entertaining or useful, I feel we are moving into a time where … you do not have a way to understand what is human made and what is not,” said Henry Ajder, founder of Latent Space Advisory, which helps business navigate the AI landscape.

Others are frustrated by the sheer volume of low-effort, AI content flooding their feeds. This kind of material is often referred to as “AI slop,” low-quality, randomly generated content made using artificial intelligence. 

Google DeepMind Veo 3.

Courtesy: Google DeepMind

“The age of slop is inevitable,” said Ajder, who is also an AI policy advisor at Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram. “I’m not sure what we do about it.”

While it’s not new, the surge in this type of content has led to growing criticism from users who say it’s harder to find meaningful or original material, particularly on apps like TikTok, YouTube and Instagram.

“I am actually so tired of AI slop,” said one user on X. “AI images are everywhere now. There is no creativity and no effort in anything relating to art, video, or writing when using AI. It’s disappointing.”

However, the creators of this AI content tell CNBC that it comes down to supply and demand. As the AI-generated content continues to get clicks, there’s no reason to stop creating more of it, said Noah Morris, a creator with 18 faceless YouTube channels.

Some argue that AI videos still have inherent artistic value, and though it’s become much easier to create, slop-like content has always existed on the internet, Lingelbach said.

“There’s never been a barrier to people making uninteresting content,” he said. “Now there’s just more opportunity to create different kinds of uninteresting content, but also more kinds of really interesting content too.”

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