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xAI joins SpaceX

spacex.com

641–650 of 1001 posts

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#641
I think there is one more possible framing for this.

Recently xAI has been in the news for Groq's revenge-porn-like "undress them" feature, which seems pretty legally questionable.

Musk has also been in the news for his own Epstein-related activities.

If he can move Groq and X into space, well, there's not very many age-of-consent or revenge-porn laws in space as far as I know, so maybe he'll be able to do some sort of legal leverage where the space data-center can produce otherwise legally questionable AI responses with impunity.

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#642

Either this is a straight up con, or Musk found a glitch in physics. It's extremely difficult to keep things cold in space.

Setting aside the possibility it's window dressing for a financial bailout, there would be two ways compute in space makes sense: 1) new technology improves vacuum heat radiation efficiency 2) new technology reduces waste heat generation from compute All the takes I've seen have been focused on #1, but I'm starting to wonder about #2... Specifically spintronics and photonic chips.

1. It's cheaper to make a vacuum on earth around a computer than it is to send a computer into space.

2. That would also presumably work on earth, unless it somehow relied on low-gravity, and would also be cheaper to benefit from on earth.

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#643
Grrreat! Grok in Space... now AI-generated non-consensual sexual materials can be made completely outside the jurisdiction of any earthly body!

Rah rah. Line goes up!

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#644
post #608
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…

Only people who never interacted with data center reliability think it's doable to maintain servers with no human intervention.

There are a class of people who may seem smart until they start talking about a subject you know about. Hank Green is a great example of this.

For many on HN, Elon buying Twitter was a wake up call because he suddenly started talking about software and servers and data centers and reliability and a ton of people with experience with those things were like "oh... this guy's an idiot".

Data centers in space are exactly like this. Your comment (correctly) alludes to this.

Companies like Google, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft all have so many servers that parts are failing constantly. They fail so often on large scales that it's expected things like a hard drive will fail while a single job might be running.

So all of these companies build systems to detect failures, disable running on that node until it's fixed, alerting someone to what the problem is and then bringing the node back online once the problem it's addressed. Everything will fail. Hard drives, RAM, CPUs, GPUs, SSDs, power supplies, fans, NICs, cables, etc.

So all data centers will have a number of technicians who are constantly fixing problems. IIRC Google's ratio tended to be about 10,000 servers per technician. Good technicians could handle higher ratios. When a node goes offline it's not clear why. Techs would take known good parts and basically replacce all of them and then figure out what the problem is later, dispose of any bad parts and put tested good parts into the pool of known good parts for a later incident.

Data centers in space lose all of this ability. So if you have a large number of orbital servers, they're going to be failing constantly with no ability to fix them. You can really only deorbit them and replace them and that gets real expensive.

Electronics and chips on satellites also aren't consumer grade. They're not even enterprise grade. They're orders of magnitude more reliable than that because they have to deal with error correction terrestial components don't due to cosmic rays and the solar wind. That's why they're a fraction of the power of something you can buy from Amazon but they cost 1000x as much. Because they need to last years and not fail, something no home computer or data center server has to deal with.

Put it this way, a hardened satellite or probe CPU is like paying $1 million for a Raspberry Pi.

And anybody who has dealt with data centers knows this.

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#645
post #125

Just 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.

This is fairly naive, Elon isn't the only investor in SpaceX. My guess is "that they did the math" and had an engineering study which convinced them that getting AI datacenters into space will make sense. It's also not hard to imagine why, the process alone once perfected could be reused for asteroid mining for example, then mirogravity manufacturing, either of which alone would be enormous capital intensive projects…

Are you a bot or are you just stupid?

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#646
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…

> We currently make around 1 TW of photovoltaic cells per year, globally. Doubling every three years; at that rate it would take about 30 years for 1TW to become 1000TW. Whether on not the trend continues largely depends on demand, but as of right now humanity seems to have an insatiable demand for power.

I think it largely depends on what bottlenecks exist that we haven’t hit yet.

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#647
post #463

A former NASA engineer with a PhD in space electronics who later worked at Google for 10 years wrote an article about why datacenters in space are very technically challenging: https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horri... I don't have any specialized knowledge of the physics but I saw an article suggesting the real reason for the push to build them in space is to hedge against political pushback pr…

It's not like launching stuff into space doesn't have pushback, either. See: starlink satellites.

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#649
post #241

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]

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 Starlink achievement alone is one of the most insane projects ever attempted and works really well.

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#650
post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We also shouldn't overlook the fact that the proposal entirely glosses over the implication of the alternative benefits we might realize if humanity achieved the incredible engineering and technical capacity necessary to make this version of space AI happen. Think about it. Elon conjures up a vision of the future where we've managed to increase our solar cell manufacturing capacity by two whole orders of magnitude an…

This is such a hypebeast paragraph. Datacenters in space are a TERRIBLE idea. Figure out how to get rid of the waste heat and get back to me.

Just have to size radiators correctly. Not a physics problem. Just an economic one.

Main physics problem is actually that the math works better at higher GPU temps for efficiency reasons and that might have reliability trade off.

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