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xAI joins SpaceX

spacex.com

511–520 of 1001 posts

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#511

The 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]

In a way, its kind of cool to see how robber barons work in real time in our generation. Its also insanely depressing as they will systematically enshittify and extract as much wealth from society as is possible.

I don't actually think the Robber Barons in the 1920s had people going out of their way to defend them and insist they had special knowledge.

The New Deal happened with massive popular support because people did not like the Barons, and wanted to stop them and actually have a life worth living.

It only took like 30 years of suffering.

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It is more than 5x less expensive to get surface area on earth’s surface.

The dominant factor is "balance of system" aka soft costs, which are well over 50%.[0]

Orbit gets you the advantage of 1/5th the PV and no large daily smoothing battery, but also no on-site installation cost, no grid interconnect fees, no custom engineering drawings, no environmental permitting fees, no grid of concrete footers, no heavy steel frames to resist wind and snow loads. The "on-site installation" is just the panels unfolding, and during launch they're compact so the support structure can be relatively lightweight.

When you cost building the datacenter alone, it's cheaper on earth. When you cost building the solar + batteries + datacenter, it (can be) cheaper in space, if you build it right and have cheap orbital launch.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_system

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#513
post #495

From the Big Short (movie) Jared Vennett (narration): "In the years that followed, hundreds of bankers and rating agency's executives went to jail. The SEC was completely overhauled, and Congress had no choice but to break up the big banks and regulate the mortgage and derivatives industries." "Just kidding. Banks took the money the American people gave them, and they used it to pay themselves huge bonuses, and lobby…

I feel like without adding some commentary with these quotes this comment lacks enough info to see how it relates to the linked article.

Because this move is entirely financial engineering to hide losses just like the roll up of X in to xAI.

None of this has anything to do with business or innovation. Do you not immediately see that? Most of my friends reaction to this news was that this is so obvious it's almost funny (or actually it is funny, since most were laughing as they read the headline).

I'm curious how you could not understand the relevance of the quote unless you were aggressively trying to not understanding it.

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#514
What if enemy or some anti-ai activities or etc attack it? How to protect it? It's just a too easy target.

It's just a dumbest idea ever if Elon truly believes it. I'm pretty sure he doesn't.

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#515
post #252

The 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]

> If elon were working for me, I would have fired him for having never delivered on any of his projects. Never? For the sheer amount of moonshot bets he's doing, his track record would make any VC jealous. Zip2, PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, Grok/xAI.

>Zip2

I guess props to scamming Compaq into making a large investment that didn't pan out. He did personally make money so I guess win for him.

>In an effort to woo investors, Elon Musk built a large casing around a standard computer to give the impression that Zip2 was powered by a supercomputer.

>PayPal

Huh? He didn't found Paypal, his company was acquired by Paypal. You might as well give him credit for eBay while you're at it. Paypal released their first digital wallet in 1999. They acquired x.com (and Musk) in 2000. Paypal itself was then acquired by eBay in 2002.

>Tesla

Investor, not founder.

>SpaceX

Yup, props here.

>Grok/xAI

Hasn't made a penny, no signs it had any path to profitability, which is why it was shoved into Space-X to cover his personal losses.

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He buys twitter at an inflated valuation. Runs it to the ground to a much lower valuation of $9B. [1] Then, his company Xai buys Twitter at a $33B, inflating the valuation up. Then SpaceX merges with Xai for no particular reason, but is expected to IPO at a $1T+ in the upcoming years. [3] I’m not that smart, but if I were, I would be thinking this is an extended way to move the losses from the Twitter purchase on to…

It also makes it impossible for Twitter/X to die, as it deserves. It is by far the most toxic mainstream social network. It has an overwhelming amount of far right supremacist content. So bad that it literally resulted in Vivek Ramaswamy, a gubernatorial candidate in Ohio, to quit Twitter/X - nearly 100% of replies to his posts were from far right racists. Obviously advertisers have not been fans. And it is a dying b…

I find HN and the tech circles to be one of the main community pillars holding up X. None of my social friends use it anymore, but links absolutely abound here, and it seems like the standard line is to pretend Elon, Grok, all the one button revenge and child porn etc don’t exist. I truly can’t fathom the amount of not thinking about it it would take to keep using the platform.

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#519
post #324

> 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…

> in what fantasy world It is already more expensive to performance maintenance on SOCs than it is to replace them. Remember, these machines are not for serving a database, there are practically no storage needs (and storage is the component that fails most often.) Given that, the main challenge is cooling, I assume that will be figured out before yeeting 100 billion $ of computers into space. Plenty of smart people…

Do smart people work at Boring Company? Do smart people work on FSD at Tesla? What about the HyperLoop? It is possible for smart people to make technical achievements without the overall project being particularly successful.

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#520
post #495

From the Big Short (movie) Jared Vennett (narration): "In the years that followed, hundreds of bankers and rating agency's executives went to jail. The SEC was completely overhauled, and Congress had no choice but to break up the big banks and regulate the mortgage and derivatives industries." "Just kidding. Banks took the money the American people gave them, and they used it to pay themselves huge bonuses, and lobby…

I feel like without adding some commentary with these quotes this comment lacks enough info to see how it relates to the linked article.

Legitimately, did you not immediately conclude it was for financial shenanigans? What did you think? I'm not trying to be shitty, but what else could there be?
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