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Anthropic is expanding to Colossus2. Will use GB200

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Re: Anthropic is expanding to Colossus2. Will use GB200

#301
post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solar and batteries are a bad choice for a constant 24/7 load. That's the exact reason we will never go fully solar (or wind) unless an insanely impressive battery breakthrough makes storage effectively free while using only common, renewable components rather than rare earths. Solar, wind, etc are excellent parts of an energy system, but its nearly impossible to cover base load at scale with generation that may only…

You may want to update your priors [1][2][3] 1. https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-how-solar-panels-and-... 2. https://www.fastcompany.com/91500104/google-minnesota-data-c... 3. https://www.rootsanalysis.com/sodium-ion-battery-market

Sodium is an interesting chemistry, though it has different voltage curves than lithium ion once hardware is built to match it they may scale well for industrial use.

That still doesn't avoid the more fundamental math of having to store such massive amounts of energy though, even if you skip batteries and pump water to retention ponds uphill.

Even for small scale residential, the recommendation is to store 3 days worth of average usage to handle stretches of cloudy days and to have a generator for the times when that still doesn't cut it. You also need enough solar that 4-6 hours of generation can fill those batteries back up after a stretch of cloudy days.

You also have to contend with frequency issues. This is what took down Spain's grid, they had turned on a ton of solar at the time - with many gas plants offline a seemingly small dip below 60Hz really wrecks much of the system when it wasn't designed to handle those swings and triggers multiple safety mechanisms.

Re: Anthropic is expanding to Colossus2. Will use GB200

#302
post #20

Very possible Elon is doing this to make give Anthropic better chances against OAI while he attempts to reshape xAI. Also possible he sees infra as the future of xAI if he really believes in the value of space compute. Hard to see this any of this as anything other than a bearish sign for Grok though.

He believes in the value of the idea of “space compute” for attracting investors to SpaceX. But the existence of the idea of “space compute” as a better way to deploy datacenters (along with everything else Musk has claimed in the past decade) should give everyone pause as to the plausibility of literally everything else he says.

> along with everything else Musk has claimed in the past decade

* mass produced EVs * Neural links to brain * reusable rockets * more efficient tunnel digging

Dude has a pretty good record of taking stuff in R&D and making pretty real products and/or companies. Can you name someone better?

Re: Anthropic is expanding to Colossus2. Will use GB200

#303
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Always felt like it would've made more sense if it was using part of the peoples' brains to do their computation, as super energy efficient computers.

I believe that was in the original script, and rewritten after some exec didn't understand how brains could be computers.

I'm going to bet it's simpler than that. I'm betting they changed the script for the Duracell product placement that made an acquaintance of mine a ton of money for pulling it off. Always follow the money.

https://alistentertainment.com/marsha-r-levine/

Re: Anthropic is expanding to Colossus2. Will use GB200

#304
post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of the proposals are laughable, some of the example calculations are. The idea of running AI training sounds extremely challenging. But the idea of inference in space doesn't seem absurd The power budget of a starlink v2 mini satellite is estimated at around 20kW based on the known solar panel size. That also matches what a satellite of that size would roughly dissipate without dedicated radiators, using just so…

The starlink satellites have hall effect thrusters, and presumably beefy laser and radio comms systems that will account for a lot of the energy budget. Also, they are sometimes in the earth's shadow, a naive calculation says they have 2x the solar budget they need, in order to charge up batteries for shade-time operations. There is no where near 20kw of compute in a single satellite, and thus no where near 20kw of h…

[deleted]

Re: Anthropic is expanding to Colossus2. Will use GB200

#305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Europe has a hugely shrinking demographic, and is actively decoupling from the United States. There's almost no innovation and you are making the mistake of getting in bed with China and constantly suing our tech companies. Europe needs to focus more on Europe and less US politics.

This might have something to do with the US president threatening to attack Greenland? Decoupling from the US is the only sane thing to do.

Denmark has a freakin' King. You guys are still a monarchy... Greenland is closer to the US than Europe, and we defended and gave back demark during WW2.

Demark provides almost no financial support to Greenland, and can't defend it. It will prove to be very strategically important as the ice caps melt.

Russia invaded Ukraine, and Demark lets russia use the Danish straights to transport oil despite the US asking them to not allow them entry. Demark has no way to protect it's own straits, how is it suppose to stop an invasion of Greenland from russia? How is it supposed to impose order and control the north artic if it can't even protect it's own straights?

These are very real security concerns from then US that a monarch can't address.

Re: Anthropic is expanding to Colossus2. Will use GB200

#306
post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of the proposals are laughable, some of the example calculations are. The idea of running AI training sounds extremely challenging. But the idea of inference in space doesn't seem absurd The power budget of a starlink v2 mini satellite is estimated at around 20kW based on the known solar panel size. That also matches what a satellite of that size would roughly dissipate without dedicated radiators, using just so…

The starlink satellites have hall effect thrusters, and presumably beefy laser and radio comms systems that will account for a lot of the energy budget. Also, they are sometimes in the earth's shadow, a naive calculation says they have 2x the solar budget they need, in order to charge up batteries for shade-time operations. There is no where near 20kw of compute in a single satellite, and thus no where near 20kw of h…

The assumption behind "spread the heat over the size of the satellite" is radiative cooling. Admittedly my numbers were a bit off, you need to make the satellite a bit bigger, or use some of your solar panels. A starlink v2 mini has 8m² of area per side, so 16m² total. To dissipate 20kW to space, at a surface temperature of 80°C and emissivity of 0.85, you need about 28m² of space. So you need to increase size a bit, or add 12m² of dedicated radiators. A bit more to deal with the real live complications (the sun exists, the earth is actually warmer than space and covers a significant portion of the sky if you are in leo, etc.).

The actual Starlink V2 Mini is has estimates for solar generation that range up to 35kW. We need a bit more, but not much more.

My numbers are a bit optimistic, but they are in the right order of magnitude. Power and cooling are very achievable in the area of putting one server on one satellite. It's the "putting one DC on one mega satellite" ideas that run into feasability issues, and for inference those aren't needed. The economics are the bigger issue, and launch costs are only moving in one direction

Re: Anthropic is expanding to Colossus2. Will use GB200

#307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is absolutely baffling to me how frequently I hear people talk about this around me. There is no way this is happening anytime in the near future.

You don't have to actually have an orbiting datacenter for the idea to work. You just have to convince enough people. Once you've done that, you can claim that regional regulations don't apply to your data because the data is in orbit. Its not like somebody is gonna go up there and catch you in the lie. Out-of-regulatory-reach is what they'll actually be selling. It can be on earth, it just has to be sufficiently hid…

The US already claims jurisdiction on all launches from US and NZ (Rocket Lab). Every one of these had to get approval from the US to launch.

Re: Anthropic is expanding to Colossus2. Will use GB200

#309
post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of the proposals are laughable, some of the example calculations are. The idea of running AI training sounds extremely challenging. But the idea of inference in space doesn't seem absurd The power budget of a starlink v2 mini satellite is estimated at around 20kW based on the known solar panel size. That also matches what a satellite of that size would roughly dissipate without dedicated radiators, using just so…

The starlink satellites have hall effect thrusters, and presumably beefy laser and radio comms systems that will account for a lot of the energy budget. Also, they are sometimes in the earth's shadow, a naive calculation says they have 2x the solar budget they need, in order to charge up batteries for shade-time operations. There is no where near 20kw of compute in a single satellite, and thus no where near 20kw of h…

The terrestrial based systems getting protested, blocked, and demonized everywhere? Those ones?

Re: Anthropic is expanding to Colossus2. Will use GB200

#310
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bad read on the situation. xAI has too much compute and not enough customers using it. They have around half a million GPUs, some of which are stolen from Tesla, running at 11% utilization. xAI predicted more people would be using Grok, but Grok is not a SOTA model & users primarily want to use SOTA models. They have excess capacity and it makes sense to rent out GPUs to other customers while they improve their model…

Grok is also tuned to align with Musk's personal beliefs. I wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole.

I keep hearing this statement, and it always makes me wonder if people have actually used Grok…

I have a Claude Max plan I use for coding, but I also have a Grok Lite plan I use for web search type tasks (similar to Perplexity) because I like how the Grok harness handles searches and I don’t need a SOTA model for that use case. I’d never pay $30/mo for a full SuperGrok account but to me it’s worth the $10/mo for Lite as I was hitting limits on the free tier.

I’ve never noticed it to be particularly biased at least for anything I’ve been searching for on it. And on the other side, I’ve never noticed it to be particularly less censored or anything compared to other models either (also a claim I’ve heard a lot about Grok but I think because it is/was part of their marketing).

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