Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

xAI joins SpaceX

spacex.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

751–760 of 1001 posts

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#751

Post by cubefox »

SilverElfin wrote: post #250
darth_avocado wrote: post #222

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…

> 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.

Twitter also has more (not total, but more) free speech than any other social networking site. For example, you are allowed to discuss empirical research on race, crime and IQ. That would get you rate limited or banned quickly on other websites, including HN.

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#752

Post by zpeti »

derektank wrote: post #557
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.

How vital is it really to national security? Starlink will have competition from Amazon Leo in the next few months. And while SpaceX is obviously in the lead in launch capability with Starship, there are multiple launch providers capable of providing roughly the same services the Falcon 9 and Heavy provide today.

> Starlink will have competition from Amazon Leo in the next few months

Amazon Leo will have 14k satellites in space in a few months? Wow! Amazing!

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#753

Post by rlt »

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?

A "fully and rapidly reusable" Starship would bring the cost of launch down orders of magnitude, perhaps to a level where it makes sense to send up satellites to repair/refuel other satellites.

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#754

Post by DoesntMatter22 »

protastus wrote: post #106
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.

Elon can't legally financially entangle Tesla to SpaceX due to Tesla being a public company, so his hands are tied. Tesla is clearly benefiting from protectionism and its sales would collapse if BYD were allowed to openly sell in the US. Most people just want affordable, maintainable and reliable cars.

Did you see how this last quarter where BYD sales fell off a cliff?

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#755

Post by Sparyjerry »

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…

[flagged]

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#756

Post by DoesntMatter22 »

nutjob2 wrote: post #137
alangibson wrote: post #89

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

It's a con, his AI business is failing, so he's rolling it up into the profitable business. Did a similar thing with Twitter. This is so obvious, but it's so stupid and at this scale that people find it hard to believe.

If they AI business is failing why did they just do a successful large raise?

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#757

Post by saratogacx »

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…

I think the Colossus[1] predated the ENIAC but is still in line with your general theme of doing stuff for the military. In this case it was used for cipher breaking, not firing calculations.

You could argue that it doesn't really count though because it was only turing complete in theory: "A Colossus computer was thus not a fully Turing complete machine. However, University of San Francisco professor Benjamin Wells has shown that if all ten Colossus machines made were rearranged in a specific cluster, then the entire set of computers could have simulated a universal Turing machine, and thus be Turing complete."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#758

Post by RealityVoid »

geuis wrote: post #677
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. Eve…

Right. You do have a point, and I think Dutch East Indies is a good example, but I feel this is discussing semantics. Too big to fail, I interpret in this situation as the government having a strategic reason to keep it afloat so it will probably prop it up in case something goes wrong. This makes it have a much more stable position.

Re: xAI joins SpaceX

#760

Post by nomilk »

dahinds wrote: post #119
alangibson wrote: post #89

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

This isn't really true, though? The ISS does it with radiators that are ~1/2 the area of its solar panels, and both should scale linearly with power?

Also, space solar is around 4-8x more efficient (24h/day full sun instead of ~4-8 on Earth), and 40% gain due to no atmospheric loss.
Post reply on HN