Elon Musk is a genius, but he’s a financing genius. Look at the long history he has of false promises supporting financing deals between his companies and you’ll see this for what it is, a cash injection and a lie to justify it. He did the same thing with a fake solar roof demo when Tesla bought the almost bankrupt Solar City. He also shifted resources from Tesla and SpaceX to support X in the early days. Even founding xAI outside of Tesla, when so much of its valuation was built on its AI capabilities, was questionable.
xAI joins SpaceX
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Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#352isn't this just fraud in broad daylight? I don't get it. Why not at least try to hide it?
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Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#353Just a neat bit of financial engineering. You can tell because Elon picked SpaceX instead of Tesla – which would have actually made sense at some level (Optimus Robots + AI). But Tesla is public and so he'd need to follow laws and reporting requirements.
You can tell it's just financial engineering because in the entire press release xAI is only mentioned in the first two sentences. Everything after that is Elon talking about space data centers to distract from the actual topic. Which seems to be working
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#354The Goalpost shift continues, If elon were working for me, I would have fired him for having never delivered on any of his projects. Hyperloop > Neuralink > Self-Driving Cars > Robotaxi fleets > Personal Robots > Orbital Datacenters > [Insert next]
hmm Tesla shipped millions of cars SpaceX launches 90% of space payloads, Starlink is working well. Thats hard to categorize as never delivered on any of his projects
The projects promised to be life altering for all mankind, they ended up being not even life altering for super rich Americans considering that Teslas are just EVs which without FSD are just regular cars with a different propellent that were made for political purposes and virtue signaling
The EV revolution has always been something almost dystopic : Trillions of dollars spent in order to not have the slightest amount of quality of life improvement, if anything a worse quality of life because you buy an EV that you cannot use 24/7/365 whereas you can an ICE car for much less .
As soon as something kinda elegant and hopeful as far as collective quality of life improvement is concerned (AI/ChatGPT) came around.....the whole green/EV revolution rightfully went out the window
If Musk was this genius you guys make him to be at 50 and with all the capital he burned he should have at least one company that if you disappeared the world would look drastically different, like if you disappeared Microsoft or Apple or Exxon or Aramco or Amazon or IBM....the world would come to a screeching halt.
Disappear one of Musk companies and everything would be the same as he's always involved in these sort of aspirational companies which have this great vision always 5 years into the future that never materialize into anything tangible or that improves the quality of life like the company I mentioned earlier
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#355> 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…
But more importantly, there is no heat dissipation in space. There’s no atmosphere to cool you, no water you can put heat into. Just an empty void. You can radiate a little, but the sun alone is enough to cook you, without you having a rack of GPUs inside your satellite. It’s completely delusional to think you could operate a data centre in a void with nowhere to put the heat.
Do you honestly believe that nobody involved has ever considered that?
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#356This means that Grok, Elon's politically labotomized involuntary pornography generator, and X (formerly Twitter), Elon's Nazi-adjacent propaganda machine, are now completely intertwined with SpaceX, a too-big-to-fail government contractor that currently serves as America's only reliable option for manned orbital spaceflight.
Anyone who doesn't see how broken this situation is isn't paying attention. This is how people like Elon, who want to seize as much power from the government as they can, ensure that the means for seizing that power are untouchable.
Anyone who has ever used Grok or X lately knows that both of these products are heavily manipulated to align with the political, social, and economic views of Elon Musk, who is increasingly boosting "white power" language and full-throatedly backing America's most nationalistic and authoritarian president to date.
This is just another consolidation of power, and it's deeply worrisome. Any integrity one may have hoped remained at SpaceX just vanished when they aligned their mission with that of these deeply problematic digital services.
And this is not even scratching the surface of what looks like a deliberate attempt to create Kessler syndrome by launching millions of cheap short-term satellites into orbit, or the rationality of putting datacenters into orbit in the first place...
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#357I am concerned, and haven’t seen anyone else point this out yet, that Musk will move Grok’s CSAM generation capabilities to space to be beyond the reach of terrestrial policing. Does this create some sort of legal loophole here so Musk can do this with impunity?
Remember that he wants to make X a bank. An orbital tax haven.
But seriously, I think legally satellites are under the jurisdiction of the country they were launched from.
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#358Didn’t Elon say that orbital solar collection was a stupid idea due to energy loss in transmission? Using AI as an almost proof-of-work shows that it may potentially be more complex problem than previously thought. If we threw Bitcoin miners up to those satellites you could literally beam money down.
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#359knowing elon, he will make this actually work, thus fully vindicating both the financial engineering and his arrogance!
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#360Genuine question: is it even theoretically possible to find some way to dump the heat that would be generated by a "data center" in space?
Yes, satellites and the ISS successfully radiate heat today.