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xAI joins SpaceX

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Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#691

Post by p1esk »

elihu wrote: post #627
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…

Honestly, there's not a lot else I can think of if your goal is find some practical and profitable way to take advantage of relatively cheap access to near-Earth space. Communication is a big one, but Starlink is already doing that. One of the things space has going for it is abundant cheap energy in the form of solar power. What can you do with megawatts of power in space though? What would you do with it? People ha…

You don't need any major technological advances to build a proof-of-concept

You do - cooling those datacenters in space is an unsolved problem.

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#692

Post by moomoo11 »

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…

We will have cyber taxis and FSD 100% next year.

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#693

Post by moomoo11 »

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…

Yeah but he’s an expert his opinion can be dismissed bro this is 2026

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#694

Post by jedberg »

fooker wrote: post #671
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'.

That's not exactly how LLM temperature works. :). Also that's on inference, not training. Presumably these would be used for training, the latency would be too high for inference.

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#695

Post by nwellinghoff »

rainsford wrote: post #548
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…

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…

Yeah it does not make a whole lot of sense as the useful lifespan of the gpus in 4-6 years. Sooo what happens when you need to upgrade or repair?

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#696

Post by camhart »

afavour wrote: post #668
camhart wrote: post #664

[flagged]

Unfortunately you led with the claim that Musk cares about freedom of speech, a claim so laughable it renders anything else you say unbelievable.

Elon's purchase of Twitter (now X) opened the door for conservative view points to be heard online. Prior to that, all other major platforms were censoring conservative views (with wide spread company leadership claiming due to pressure from Biden administration).

I regularly use X. I get blasted with political posts from both sides constantly on it.

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#698

Post by kortilla »

JumpinJack_Cash wrote: post #407
kortilla wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being too big to fail is not really a desirable outcome, it’s just better than failure. Boeing is too important to fail as well but it’s been terrible as a shareholder

> > Boeing is too important to fail as well but it’s been terrible as a shareholder Your opinion on Boeing being terrible as a shareholder vis-a-vis Tesla would be completely reversed if dividends and capital gains of the 2 companies were to be offered in the form of miles to be flown on Boeing planes and miles on Teslas Uber/Taxi/Autonomous taxis instead of dollars The absolute overperformance on the stock market th…

Im not comparing it to Tesla, im comparing it to any normal successful company (apple, google, nvidia, Exxon, whatever).

Boeing is an anemic company that doesn’t innovate and it should have been allowed to bankrupt and break off into businesses that worked and actually competed for customers.

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#699

Post by moomoo11 »

rybosworld wrote: post #169
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…

An 8 GPU B200 cluster goes for about $500k right now. You'd need to put thousands of those into space to mimic a ground-based data center. And the launch costs are best case around 10x the cost of the cluster itself. Letting them burn up in the atmosphere every time there's an issue does not sound sustainable.

Let me rip my bong real quick..

What if you had a fleet of Optimus robots up there who would actually operate a TSMC in space and they would maintain the data centers in space?

Hold on let me enter a K hole…

What if we just did things?

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#700

Post by moomoo11 »

hristov wrote: post #210
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…

Currently, just a cursory google search shows $1500-3000 per kilogram to put something into low earth orbit. Lets take the low bound because of efficiencies of scale. So $1500. A million tons will cost $1500x1000x1000000= 1,500,000,000,000. That is one and a half TRILLION dollars per year. That is only the lift costs, it does not take into account the cost of manufacturing the actual space data centers. Who is going…

AI and space based economy
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