Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

xAI joins SpaceX

spacex.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 1001 posts

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#311

Post by JumpinJack_Cash »

bko wrote: post #58
baggachipz wrote: post #3

Well surely this acquisition is above board. Nothing funny going on here, just good old business as usual.

What's funny? Do you think the investors are against this? The investor's aren't idiots. I imagine the typical investor in Elon Musk's companies would approve of this sort of thing. So what's the problem? Besides, its a private company with Musk as majority shareholder in both. That's the beauty of private companies, you can just do things. I wish more companies were private and ambitious. I'm tired of companies like…

> > I'm tired of companies like Apple making marginal spec bumps to their phones and milking the same products for decades

At least what Apple does is real not make believe like everything Musk claims , disappear boring Apple or even boring Microsoft, Oracle, IBM etc.

And the world would come to a screeching halt, disappear all of Musk companies and people would barely notice.

You seem to be eager to be sold dreams , that's exactly what vaporware salesmen like Musk hope to find on their path

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#312

Post by _DeadFred_ »

consumer451 wrote: post #251
rybosworld wrote: post #70

> 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…

Here is my main question: Musk is on record as being concerned about runaway "evil AI." I used to write that off as sci-fi thinking. For one thing, just unplug it. So, let's accept that Musk's concern of evil runaway AI is a real problem. In that case, is there anything more concerning than a distributed solar powered orbital platform for AI inference? Elon Musk appears to be his own nemesis.

What, creating a huge patchwork of self sufficient AIs, forming their own sky based net, seems bad to you, considering the whole torment nexus/Sky Net connotations? It's not like he's planning to attach it to his giant humanoid robot program. Oh. Ohhhhh. Oh no.

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#313

Post by dangus »

CGMthrowaway wrote: post #233
rybosworld wrote: post #70

> 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…

There's clearly rhetorical hyperbole happening there. But assuming that thermal rejection is good in space, & launch costs continue falling, as earth-based data centers become power/grid-constrained, there is a viable path for space power gen. The craziest part of those statements is "100 kW per ton." IDK what math he is doing there or future assumptions, but today we can't even sniff at 10 kW per ton. iROSA [1] on t…

Elon is a pathological liar and it’s crazy that he still gets sanewashed after all he’s done. It’s insanity that he hasn’t been kicked out of leading his companies, and it’s also insanity that he hasn’t been prosecuted by the SEC.

You’ve spent too much life force trying to even understand the liar’s fake logic.

Let’s start right here: there is no such thing as becoming power/grid constrained on earth. If you replaced just the cornfields that the United States uses just to grow corn for ethanol in gasoline just in the corn belt, you could power the entire country with solar+batteries+wind. Easily, and cheaply.

If you don’t even believe that solar+batteries are cheap (they are), fine, choose your choice of power plant. Nuclear works fine.

The truth is, xAI combining with SpaceX is almost certainly corrupt financial engineering. SpaceX as a government contractor and that means Elon’s pal Trump can now siphon money into xAI via the federal government.

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#314

Post by wongarsu »

willis936 wrote: post #141
wongarsu wrote: post #117

Earlier 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…

How do you make a small fortune? Start with a big one. The thing being called obvious here is that the maintenance you have to do on earth is vastly cheaper than the overspeccing you need to do in space (otherwise we would overspec on earth). That's before even considering the harsh radiation environment and the incredible cost to put even a single pound into low earth orbit.

Note how Musk cleverly doesn't claim that not doing maintenance drives down costs.

Nothing in there is a lie, but any substance is at best implied. Yes, 1,000,000 tons/year * 100kW/ton is 100GW. Yes, there would be no maintenance and negligible operational cost. Yes, there is some path to launching 1TW/year (whether that path is realistic isn't mentioned, neither what a realistic timeline would be). And then without providing any rationale Elon states his estimate that the cheapest way to do AI compute will be in space in a couple years. Elon is famously bad at estimating, so we can also assume that this is his honest belief. That makes a chain of obviously true statements (or close to true, in the case of operating costs), but none of them actually tell us that this will be cheap or economically attractive. And all of them are complete non-sequiturs.

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#315

Post by pron »

I know that per HN's guidelines we're supposed to be "kind and curious", and "reply to the argument instead of calling names". But with some texts, engaging with individual arguments loses sight of the more important bigger picture. So while unkind, the most "thoughtful and substantive" thing I think can be said about this text is:

The man's a moron.

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#316

Post by magicalist »

vessenes wrote: post #177
rybosworld wrote: post #70

> 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…

[flagged]

> I will say there's a MASSIVE cost to getting power infrastructure, land, legal stuff done on terra firma; all that just sort of .. goes away when you're deploying to space, at least if you're deploying to space early and fast.

You need both power infrastructure and structures to build within for deploying in space too. And you have to build them and then put it all into space.

Cost per square foot of land is not that high basically anywhere you could build a datacentre to offset that.

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#317

Post by torginus »

willis936 wrote: post #141
wongarsu wrote: post #117

Earlier 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…

How do you make a small fortune? Start with a big one. The thing being called obvious here is that the maintenance you have to do on earth is vastly cheaper than the overspeccing you need to do in space (otherwise we would overspec on earth). That's before even considering the harsh radiation environment and the incredible cost to put even a single pound into low earth orbit.

How much maintenance do you need? Lets say you have hardware whose useful lifespan due to obsolescence is 5 years, and in 4, the satellite will crash into the atmosphere anyways.

Let's say given component failure rates, you can expect for 20% of the GPUs to fail in that time. I'd say that's acceptable.

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#318

Post by codechicago277 »

kemotep wrote: post #56

If Musk and SpaceX are serious about putting 1 million datacenter satellites into space, then they are not serious about Mars. You cannot simultaneously build and launch 10’s of thousands of Starships to deliver 1 million tons of equipment and supplies bound to Mars while also committing to launching 10’s of thousands of Starships to orbit full of satellites. They would need to quadruple their launch rate, and half o…

Maybe this is beyond parody…

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1005577738332172289

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#319

Post by __alexs »

moeadham wrote: post #276
gok wrote: post #45

> it is possible to put 500 to 1000 TW/year of AI satellites into deep space, meaningfully ascend the Kardashev scale and harness a non-trivial percentage of the Sun’s power We currently make around 1 TW of photovoltaic cells per year, globally. The proposal here is to launch that much to space every 9 hours, complete with attached computers, continuously, from the moon. edit: Also, this would capture a very trivial…

In fairness, solar cells can be about 5x more efficient in space (irradiance, uptime).

Solar cells have exactly the same power rating on earth as in space surely? What would change is their capacity factor and so energy generation.
Post reply on HN