Either this is a straight up con, or Musk found a glitch in physics. It's extremely difficult to keep things cold in space.
Just put a fan in a window.
xAI joins SpaceX
151–160 of 1001 posts
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#152> The basic math is that launching a million tons per year of satellites generating 100 kW of compute power per ton would add 100 gigawatts of AI compute capacity annually, with no ongoing operational or maintenance needs. Ultimately, there is a path to launching 1 TW/year from Earth. > My estimate is that within 2 to 3 years, the lowest cost way to generate AI compute will be in space. This is so obviously false. Fo…
You operate them like Microsoft's submerged data center project: you don't do maintenance, whatever fails fails. You start with enough redundancy in critical components like power and networking and accept that compute resources will slowly decrease as nodes fail No operational needs is obviously ... simplified. You still need to manage downlink capacity, station keeping, collision avoidance, etc. But for a large con…
Unless I missed something the Microsoft underwater data center was basically a publicity stunt.
Anyone who thinks it makes sense to blast data centers into space has never seen how big and heavy they are, or thought about their immense power consumption, much less the challenge of radiating away that much waste heat into space.
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#153I have so many conflicting thoughts that I cannot properly articulate yet. I can say though, this is not going to end well for most, it is clumsily premeditated and starting to feel like dude is just trying to be a Neal Stephenson character.
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
You operate them like Microsoft's submerged data center project: you don't do maintenance, whatever fails fails. You start with enough redundancy in critical components like power and networking and accept that compute resources will slowly decrease as nodes fail No operational needs is obviously ... simplified. You still need to manage downlink capacity, station keeping, collision avoidance, etc. But for a large con…
Being under the ocean in a metal box you don't get too many micro-meteors or cosmic rays though.
Just like you don’t get much water in space.
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#155Either this is a straight up con, or Musk found a glitch in physics. It's extremely difficult to keep things cold in space.
This isn't really true, though? The ISS does it with radiators that are ~1/2 the area of its solar panels, and both should scale linearly with power?
Moving electricity long distance is a lot easier than moving coolant long distances, which puts a soft limit on the reasonable size of the solar array of these satellites. But as long as you stay below that and pick a reasonable orbit it's indeed not too bad, you just have to properly plan for it
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#156> The basic math is that launching a million tons per year of satellites generating 100 kW of compute power per ton would add 100 gigawatts of AI compute capacity annually, with no ongoing operational or maintenance needs. Ultimately, there is a path to launching 1 TW/year from Earth. > My estimate is that within 2 to 3 years, the lowest cost way to generate AI compute will be in space. This is so obviously false. Fo…
You operate them like Microsoft's submerged data center project: you don't do maintenance, whatever fails fails. You start with enough redundancy in critical components like power and networking and accept that compute resources will slowly decrease as nodes fail No operational needs is obviously ... simplified. You still need to manage downlink capacity, station keeping, collision avoidance, etc. But for a large con…
Accountants love this
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#157SpaceX is too big to fail. It's important for national security. I wonder if Elon wants to tangle all his businesses into SpaceX so they are all kept afloat by SpaceX's importance.
Let’s be honest - this is just a way to prop up Twitter/X. It makes SpaceX shareholders subsidize X, and also American taxpayers who are giving contracts to SpaceX for highly sensitive things. The government should ideally refuse to give SpaceX work unless it unwinds this.
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#158> In the long term, space-based AI is obviously the only way to scale. I never questioned it. Space is also extremely cold, and if it's as dense as Musk cooling won't be an issue.
I can't tell how many layers of sarcasm are here, but I just want to highlight that aktshually cooling in space is quite difficult because there is no convection, so the only cooling option is radiative. Which gets a bit hard when the satellite gets blasted by the sun. The ISS doesn't have problems staying warm, it has problems cooling off.
Hence the “dense as Musk” comment
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#159Either this is a straight up con, or Musk found a glitch in physics. It's extremely difficult to keep things cold in space.
what makes you believe this?
radiators can be made as long as desirable within the shade of the solar panels, hence the designer can pracitically set arbitrarily low temperatures above the background temperature of the universe.
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#160I still don't understand the "data center in space" narrative. How are they going to solve the cooling issue?
Presumably the cooling problem gets hand waved away as a technical detail, and the real selling point is data centers that aren't subject to any regional governments laws.