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Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters

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Re: Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters

#831

Post by kybernetikos »

rincebrain wrote: post #618
CamperBob2 wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zoning is one area that’s better in space. Not really, though? The idea that Earth-based data centers need to be built in populated, developed areas is indeed dumb, yet it seems to be inexplicably baked into everyone's assumptions. In particular, the small discrete data centers that Musk wants to launch could go anywhere on Earth. They could be powered by local PV arrays and batteries, they can be cooled by smaller r…

The problem is that you need humans to run datacenters, and so that puts ceilings on how far away from humans you can put them without the humans no longer being willing to commute there. And the cost of building all the infra to support humans living in an area that humans are not already populating is enormous.

> you need humans to run datacenters.

As far as I can tell from random articles online, it seems that as a rule of thumb, you need about 6 humans +1.5 humans per megawatt - and that's just for running the datacenter part, different people maintain the power generation infrastructure. Now, if you have to house those people in space or fly them up whenever they have to do anything, that's going to destroy your budget.

If you want to assume a level of automation that makes that unnecessary, that's fine, but then you need to also assume that same level of automation in earth based data centers too, and everything that goes with that.

Re: Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters

#832

Post by trollbridge »

measurablefunc wrote: post #95
trollbridge wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there really a network effect, though? What’s the moat?

If you are using an AI w/ 100 users who are writing throwaway software vs someone who is using AI w/ 1000 users who are writing software w/ formal specifications then guess which AI is going to win? The answer is plainly obvious to me but might not be to those who haven't thought about how current AIs actually work.

Now swap those usage numbers.

Re: Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters

#833

Post by gigatexal »

tehlike wrote: post #822
gigatexal wrote: post #651

Maybe SpaceX will buy xAI and Tesla to hide the systemic problems at his companies into the warm embrace of the one legit useful company.

Spacex did buy xai.

Right. I forgot about that. Maybe Tesla is next.

Re: Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters

#834

Post by solid_fuel »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #535
snackerblues wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

And I repeat > I don't know why [This person done bad actions] has to be a political statement these days, but thems the brakes here. Thanks for proving my point.

They’re a troll account, only a few days old.

Re: Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters

#835

Post by jfil »

jahnu wrote: post #742
pavlov wrote: post #693

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This kind of conditioning has to be damaging to the model’s reasoning. Consider how research worked in the Stalinist Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Scientists had to be mindful of topics where they needed to either avoid it completely or explicitly adapt it to the leader’s ideology. Grok is a digital version of the same thing.

You can’t put a gun to someone’s head, order them to be creative, and also expect good results.

Counterpoint: Sergei Korolev and Andrei Tupolev

Re: Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters

#836

Post by kybernetikos »

vessenes wrote: post #317
tartoran wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is cooling though?

Yeah I wonder the same thing - I keep getting told heat management in space is hard, but nobody discusses this inre the data centers. My understanding is one cooling mechanism is to just shoot lasers out into space (is this sci fi?) - I guess in that case you could just send energy back to your solar rigs, depending on wavelengths. TLDR: no idea

I understand that in earth based data centers, 30-40% of the power is spent on cooling. That's in facilities that can cool using conduction and convection to the outside environment.

I don't have any experience in this area, but it seems like for every square meter of solar panel you need about half that in radiator area. And depending on your orbit, these are probably not static things just sitting there, they need to be orientated correctly to work and their correct orientations will change over time.

The worry for me is the level of human maintenance required. The ISS has probably the biggest solar array around, and they send humans out to perform maintainance and repair on it multiple times a year. A decent size data center would need an order of magnitude more solar and radiators than the ISS, and so presumably would need even more maintenance.

Re: Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters

#837

Post by omgwtfbyobbq »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #600
w0m wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why did Tesla work initially? Becaues they were ~first to market - and honestly, as a tesla driver for the last 6 years - It's the best car I ever owned (including Toyota, Mazda, and domestics). 6 years ago, for the effective price of a Honda Accord, I was able to get a car with excellent AWD for NorEast winters, perfect weight distribution (previously drove a Miata for comparison), could beat ~95% 'super cars' in…

Not even Tesla fans claim that Tesla is reliable. https://www.motor1.com/news/781164/tesla-used-car-reliabilit... For a year when we were doing the digital nomad thing, my wife and I didn’t own a car and we rented plenty of EVs. Tesla was by far our least favorite. Not having CarPlay alone is dealbreaker

As an anecdote, the two I've had are fairly reliable. The older one did have more issues (4+ in warranty?, 3 out of warranty), but they've all been small/manageable so far.

Re: Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters

#838

Post by Braxton1980 »

kvetching wrote: post #354
Braxton1980 wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>He wants it to be truthful How do you know this? Why would you believe him considering the massive lies he's told, for example about the 2020 widespread election fraud

https://artificialanalysis.ai/evaluations/omniscience?omnisc... AA-Omniscience Hallucination Rate (lower is better) measures how often the model answers incorrectly when it should have refused or admitted to not knowing the answer. It is defined as the proportion of incorrect answers out of all non-correct responses, i.e. incorrect / (incorrect + partial answers + not attempted). Grok 4.2 which was just released in t…

This isn't a response to my question. I asked why you trust him

Re: Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters

#839

Post by vessenes »

tehlike wrote: post #824
vessenes wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SX investor here: the combined value of SX is well up on the private secondary market post-acquisition. It was value accretive, in very real dollar terms.

What sort of liquidity is there? The other question I have is Elon is looking into nasdaq listing with passive funds buying from get go to keep the buying pressure on a low float. Any risk that's not seen?

For reference, I've been asked in the last month for a $500mm chunk of stock to a single buyer at or (slightly) above the combination price. At that price, there is no liquidity - it's below ask.

Re: Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters

#840

Post by danenania »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #800
danenania wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about maintenance? I’d naively assume that’s the killer.

> What about maintenance? Simply put, you don’t. Your DC is launched into its graveyard. If a chip burns out it burns out—maybe rack design is a bit more redundant to keep failures as independent as possible. Maybe at some point repair is a valid optimization. But it’s not necessary for an MVP, namely, one that is competitive against 3 to 5-year terrestrial delays and sub-10% costs of capital for such projects. That’…

It seems like that could change the math quite a bit, since you’d presumably be losing a lot of capacity to failures. I’d assume you would have a much higher failure rate in space, and component failure is already pretty common on earth.
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