xAI joins SpaceX

This is obviously about propping up a shaky business (SpaceX) by making people believe that data centers in space are a solution. It's just riding the AI hype wave.

It's impossible to cool servers effectively in space, and, even though I'm skeptical, I'm more inclined to believe in a project to put them in the ocean than in space, simply because water conducts heat, unlike a vacuum.

Sure, there's a lot of room in space, but: - it will always take more energy to get into orbit than to install servers on Earth - the distance between the data center and us adds latency, which is not desirable for an LLM - the distance between the satellites themselves adds a huge amount of latency, making the data center less efficient

In a nutshell, there are physical problems that can never, ever be solved by science or technology, and even science fiction doesn't dare to invent scenarios this implausible. But then, coming from a pedophile who lied about his ties to Epstein, is it really surprising that he's lying and trying to divert attention right now.

The staggering amount of money Elon Musk raised for doing AI stuff is quite a bit more than what he ever expended on the Twitter value implosion. I think we can agree that there isn't much left of that. Also, whatever debt was issued for that was issued in dollars. We've had a few years of inflation and dollar devaluation recently. I don't think whatever Twitter debt there was is much of big headache for X at this point.

X.ai is controversial mainly because of Musk. But if you can look beyond that, it does actually have a bit of non trivial IP. Grok is not bad as a LLM. It's not necessarily best in class but it's close enough to be useful. Apple needs to license their AI from Google and OpenAI. MS outsources to OpenAI. Amazon doesn't really have their own models at all. So, as trillion dollar companies go, having your own in house developed model training pipeline that actually works isn't all that common yet.

Musk for all his failings has a talent for looking beyond the current day to day navel gazing that characterizes VC short term thinking and much of the activity in silicon valley. He clearly looks at space as a bit of underused real estate.

Star Link is one of those mad plans that actually seems to make sense now that he has proven that launching thousands of satellites into space isn't that big of a deal and can actually be profitable if you get a few million people to spend billions per month on reliable data connections.

AI data centers in space are similarly ludicrous unless you have a newly developed 100+ ton to orbit reusable launch capability at your disposal. Also, the nature of doing stuff in space is that it is a very people hostile environment. So having some in house AI capability isn't the worst idea for a space company with ambition, which like it or not SpaceX clearly has. I wouldn't call X.ai a bar gain. But what's the alternative if you are semi serious about controlling an armada of space craft across the solar system?