cold (room temp) fusion was talked up for a few years there too, bub
The results were highly irreproducable and the energy balance was very hard to measure properly.
We did, however, detected neutrons and some pretty impressive exothermic events that suggested that fusion was occurring.
Fast forward to 2025 and the University of British Columbia has just published a paper documenting a 15% excess energy and an unambiguous neutron flux that strongly supports fusion.
It seems as though it should be easier to achieve some form of human-like intelligence in AI, or AGI than “cold fusion”. But close to a $Trillion has been spent on AI models in the last few years. Although their pattern recognition has been improved none of the models have developed any true understanding, causal reasoning, common sense, or the ability to adapt to unusual situations without a whole lot of additional data and programming.
Despite this the constant hype has tens of millions of people convinced that their jobs are about to be replaced.