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xAI joins SpaceX

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Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#671

Post by fooker »

jedberg wrote: post #285

Whenever computer chips go into space, they have to be hardened against radiation, because there is no atmosphere to protect them. Otherwise you get random bit flips. This process takes a while, which is partly why all the computers in space seem out of date. Because they are. No one is going to want to use chips that are a many years out of date or subject to random bit flips. (Although now it got me thinking, do ra…

LLMs specifically are fine with random bits flipped for the results to be 'creative'.

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#673

Post by adventured »

keepamovin wrote: post #656
rainsford wrote: post #548

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…

[flagged]

There's no reason to think the brilliant minds at SpaceX are supportive of focusing their mission in any manner-what-so-ever on datacenters in space. You can't call on their genius as the supportive argument accordingly.

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#674

Post by fblp »

jmyeet wrote: post #644
lugao wrote: post #608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Great comment on hardware and maintenance costs, and in comparison Elon wrote "My estimate is that within 2 to 3 years, the lowest cost way to generate AI compute will be in space." It's a pity this reads like the entire acquisition of xAi is based on "Elon's napkin math" (maybe he checked it with Grok)

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#676

Post by rmccue »

GMoromisato wrote: post #592
SimianSci wrote: post #113

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]

I'm amazed at this kind of thinking. I get it, obviously, and it's not uncommon, but still. Elon Musk has already revolutionized three industries: 1. EVs: Before Tesla, no one thought electric cars could be a mass-market product. And even today, the Model 3 and Model Y are at the top of almost all sales lists. 2. Orbital Launch: No one expected Space X to succeed. What does a software guy know about real engineering?…

> Boring Company has actually built tunnels and passengers are actually riding it. No one else is even trying.

Boring Company bought an existing tunnel boring machine (TBM), and used it to dig a car tunnel. Their only “innovation” in terms of any cost savings is to dig smaller tunnels - which we already knew could be done (tunnel cost grows with diameter), and which we don’t do for good reasons (capacity, emergency egress).

The branding and marketing exercise was excellent though.

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#677

Post by geuis »

Buttons840 wrote: post #50

SpaceX is too big to fail. It's important for national security. I wonder if Elon wants to tangle all his businesses into SpaceX so they are all kept afloat by SpaceX's importance.

Of course it isn't "too big to fail". Even banks aren't. Despite recent history large banks have failed often throughout history. There's no such thing. It may take down the supporting sovereign government (Dutch East Indies) but life goes on and new political orgs appear. People be people.

Too big to fail is a very recent modern myth. Go back 100+ years and lots of banks failed leading into the Great Depression.

Every system has a break point.

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#678

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

n_u wrote: 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…

> 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

It's curious that we live in a world in which I think the majority of people somehow think this ISN'T complicated.

Like, have we long since reached the point where technology is suitably advanced to average people that it seems like magic, where people can almost literally propose companies that just "conjure magic" and the average person thinks that's reasonable?

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#679

Post by torlok »

raincole wrote: post #192

> scaling to make a sentient sun to understand the Universe and extend the light of consciousness to the stars! I didn't realize SpaceX's media press is even cringer than Elon's average tweet...

There's an audience for this. People have been taking these vapid statements and his trouble with communicating as evidence of genius for well over a decade now.

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#680

Post by coliveira »

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…

This is all based on bad math. The people proposing these things don't even have proper scientific and mathematical training to determine what is achievable.
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