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xAI joins SpaceX

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Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#731

Post by mlindner »

mmaunder wrote: post #716

In the past 40 years we’ve seen power per unit of compute decrease by over 40 million times. This says we need to put data centers in space because we can’t produce enough power on earth for AI. That won’t be the case as history has shown, but this is a great way to get AI money for your space ships if you’re going to IPO.

It's interesting as the space fans (who often dismiss AI) say this is a project to get SpaceX's space/Starlink profits for AI. But the AI people seem to think this is to get AI money for space projects.

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#732

Post by asa400 »

Why not put these AI/PV installations somewhere out in the ocean instead? A tiny fraction of the energy required to ship them there, you can actually physically get there to fix them, can use seawater for cooling, can use existing Starlink for connectivity, etc. Why/how is space more economical than international waters?

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#733

Post by dpacmittal »

This is very clearly a move to sell SpaceX IPO at overinflated prices by promising a vision of a future which is perpetually 5 years away. SpaceX is going to be the next meme stock.

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#734

Post by moezd »

In other words, he's cooking the books again.

People confuse being able to think big with being allowed to think big. With this much money loaned to him, protectionism and too many PR stunts, I don't think he delivered big enough, and he won't be able to at some point. This is madness.

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#735

Post by ml-anon »

SilverElfin wrote: post #157
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.

Let’s be honest - this is just a way to prop up Twitter/X. It makes SpaceX shareholders subsidize X, and also American taxpayers who are giving contracts to SpaceX for highly sensitive things. The government should ideally refuse to give SpaceX work unless it unwinds this.

It’s also a way to distract from the fact that alleged pedophile and rapist Elon had 3 underaged foreign nationals trafficked to him at the space x headquarters by convinced pedophile and rapist Jeffrey Epstein, per the Epstein files.

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#736

Post by Rzor »

dzonga wrote: post #553

Anyone remember the quote by Russ Hanneman on SV [0] - "No Revenue, means you're potential pure play" We know datacenters in space - sound plausible enough - yet not practical - hence they're potential pure play - also you can have massive solar in space - unlimited space -- etc -- all true -- but how economical / practical is it ? yet we know on earth - to power the whole earth with solar - only a fraction of the la…

The entire thing is a play. Musk should be a science fiction writer. He has that uncanny ability to create a statement that compresses 100+ years of industrial evolution into a few sentences.

>Factories on the Moon can take advantage of lunar resources to manufacture satellites and deploy them further into space.

I love how he goes from "the raw material is there" to "we will build high-tech supply chain to process them", just like that, magically.

https://i.imgur.com/wLJ60Vj.jpeg [I think you should be more explicit here in step two]

Also, https://xkcd.com/1724/

Edit: Formatting

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#737

Post by somenameforme »

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…

A lot of great inventions we now take for granted initially came with little motivation other than being able to kill each other more effectively. GPS, radar, jet engines, drones, super glue, microwaves, canned food, computers, even the internet. Contrary to the narrative of the internet being about sharing science, ARPANET was pushed by the DoD as a means of maintaining comms during nuclear war. It was then adopted by universities and research labs and started along the trajectory most are more familiar with.

The tale of computers is even more absurd. The first programmable, electric, and general-purpose digital computer was ENIAC. [1] It was built to... calculate artillery firing tables. I expect in the future that the idea of putting a bunch of solar into space to run GPUs for LLMs will probably seem, at the minimum - quaint, but that doesn't mean the story ends there.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#738

Post by spikels »

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…

Google is currently working on AI data centers in space.

https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/research/go...

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#739

Post by Peaches4Rent »

somenameforme wrote: post #737
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…

A lot of great inventions we now take for granted initially came with little motivation other than being able to kill each other more effectively. GPS, radar, jet engines, drones, super glue, microwaves, canned food, computers, even the internet. Contrary to the narrative of the internet being about sharing science, ARPANET was pushed by the DoD as a means of maintaining comms during nuclear war. It was then adopted…

Yes, but as Ron Perlman famously said in the beginning of Fallout, "War never changes".

I would be more shocked that we eliminated war than if we achieved this version of Elon's future.

It makes sense to think that we will continue to make scientific progress through war and self defense.

Reason being, nothing is more motivating than wanting to survive

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#740

Post by mandeepj »

nwellinghoff wrote: post #695
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…

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?

> the useful lifespan of the gpus in 4-6 years. Sooo what happens when you need to upgrade or repair?

Average life of starlink satellite is around 4-5 years

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