Suggest changing the elevator pitch text - it’s never going to make sense to train a frontier model in space. In our lifetime at least.
I'll take the long side on that bet
Starcloud
91–100 of 325 posts
Re: Starcloud
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
>But cooling is a huge problem. Space is cold, but there is no medium to transfer the heat away from the hot objects. I think this will be the biggest sticking point, unless they came up with an innovative solution. Their main tech breakthrough would have to be in this area otherwise the company is worthless imo.
It's possible to do all of this with current technology. Just... Why? The cost would be exorbitant; even with really clever deployment tech, the launch costs are gonna be dominated by solar panels and radiators. This is a super cool idea and seems like perfect investor-bait. That's about where it ends.
Genuinely most "AI" DCs are spending less than 9KW on cooling for every 100KW of servers. If you were that bothered about getting that to zero, you could literally sink them into the ocean, build a heat network so the town can take the heat for free or use any of a dozen more established and practical ways to do that.
Re: Starcloud
#93Aside from the obvious cooling issues people have already mentioned, isn't cosmic radiation also very unkind to modern ultra dense silicon? AIUI they tend to use really old silicon processes in space stuff for that reason, and even then they have to build in redundant compute to mitigate logic errors that probably wouldn't happen on Earth.
This. Had to deal with cosmic rays on earth in data centers 20 years ago.
I can't imagine running bleeding edge GPUs in a particle accelerator and getting reasonable results.
Re: Starcloud
#94What does space give us that Earth does not in this scenario? Free real estate? They only mention falling costs for deployment.
There's an answer in their whitepaper[0] - see Table 1. tl;dr - power is continuous and free via solar array [0] - https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf
> power is continuous and free via solar array
It’s is on earth as well using solar and batteries. What is likely to get cheaper faster? Solar and batteries? Or lifting datacenters to space? The world is almost at the point of deploying 1TW/year of solar, and batteries are catching up. No space required. There aren't a lot of VC investment opportunities speeding the rate of solar and battery deployments though.
Re: Starcloud
#95Does abundant cooling in space mean there's a better way to radiate away heat than on Earth or just that the heat doesn't contribute to heating up Earth or something more complicated? (Asking because I thought cooling was a big problem in space.)
Re: Starcloud
#96I guess since we decided Idiocracy was aspirational, why not Wall-E as well.
/s (kinda but maybe not really...)
Re: Starcloud
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
Their whitepaper explains their cooling "solution": https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf > As conduction and convection to the environment are not available in space, this means the data center will require radiators capable of radiatively dissipating gigawatts of thermal load. To achieve this, Starcloud is developing a lightweight deployable radiator design with a very large area - by far the largest radiators depl…
I don't get it--are the founders just grifters? How did this startup even make it off the drawing board?
Probably because space companies will invest in you to feed their bubble.
You have to find trillions of dollars of future launches to justify current valuations.
Re: Starcloud
#98How does “passive cooling” work in space?
Followup question, wouldn't nearly any cooling solution that works in space also work on the ground? Radiative cooling is the most basic/common cooling solution on the ground, the main challenge is just figuring out how to to move heat from the component to the radiator, which I don't think is solved by simply putting it in space?
> Radiative cooling is the most basic/common cooling solution on the ground
Thats tricky. I know the heat exchange components are called radiators but most of the heat they give off is by convection not radiation. (At least here on the ground.) I heard 80%-20% rule of thumb.
But you are right in the broad strokes. Cooling is not easier in space. Mostly because you have no convective heat transfer.
Re: Starcloud
#99These venture capital scams are getting more and more creative...
Re: Starcloud
#100Reading the paper this sounds like space Theranos. If they start producing results then I'd double check to make sure it's not just calculated on regular data centres and that they're just pretending its from their space stations.
Aside from the technical concerns already raised in other comments, I'm also not sure we really want all this private for-profit usage of earth's orbit. The orbital environment is already somewhat congested and people have already been raising concerns about it. There is the potential for it all to spectacularly blow up in our faces and become so polluted that we won't be able to do many launches at all.