I'm sure the consummate professional(s), Shotwell and her team, are now delighted to be associated with xAI ... that stalwart of the CSAM community.
xAI joins SpaceX
971–980 of 1001 posts
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#972Is there anything substantially different about Google's announcement https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45813267 that makes it any more sane than the Space-X announcement?
Google never came up with a sentient sun.
There's also a YC startup "Starcloud trains first AI model in space using Nvidia hardware" https://www.proactiveinvestors.com/companies/news/1084176/st...
>the satellite successfully ran Google’s open large language model Gemma and trained NanoGPT on Shakespeare’s works, generating responses in the style of the playwright.
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#973Any details regarding valuations etc?
>Rocket company boosts valuation to $1tn and pays $250bn to acquire AI start-up
ft
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#974Orbital debris is a likely outcome of datacenters in space. Orbital debris cannot be recovered without permission. Wireless power beaming burns the atmosphere. If it is n % efficient, then where is the other 100-n % of that energy? What is the minimum latency to each of the LaGrange points? We should send humanoid robots to establish human-sized habitats with airlocks for a number of years before risking humans. -- 2…
More predictions and concerns for the future:
Can Humans that breathe CO2 breathe on Earth?
Humans with tardigrade DNA for radiation resistance risk their offspring losing said advantage if they cross with a person who is not so hardened.
Without artificial gravity and fortification, humans' musculoskeletal structures will not develop sufficiently in lower gravity to survive on Earth. If a person is born on Mars, what do they need to do to physically return to Earth?
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#975> 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…
Whilst I agree that this glosses over a huge number of technical obstacles, space based solar power could scale more easily than that on earth. Lack of variable weather and gravity means rather than using photovoltaic cells, you can just set up paper thin huge mirrors to focus light and generate steam. Caveat: my understanding of this largely comes from the book The High Frontier, which is really old and probably ina…
>space based solar power could scale more easily than that on earth.
Actually provide an argument instead of just asserting this.
On earth, deployment of a built solar panel is screwing it into a dirt cheap frame on the ground.
To deploy a solar panel in space, you must attach it to a satellite that no one involved has even pretended to claim is designed, so you need a factory for those on the same order of magnitude as your panels, you need enough boost capacity, so a factory for rockets, and a much larger fuel industry, and then you need all the immense engineering required to do any of that at all, and then you need to spin up the industries to supply this brand new industry, and then you need to manage all those satellites in space, and then you still don't get any actual power because it's all in space so you haven't scaled SHIT
It's all absolute horseshit. No, none of this is planned. He's just going to cash in on the IPO.
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#976> 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…
This is all based on bad math. The people proposing these things don't even have proper scientific and mathematical training to determine what is achievable.
They never did any math at all. They knew their supporters would burn thousands of hours and bend over backwards doing dishonest math for them and provide cover for what is a looting operation.
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#977As a SpaceX fan, I am saddened by this news. The only reason for xAI to join SpaceX is to offload Elon's Twitter debt in the upcoming IPO.
The Twitter debt is not that big in the grand scheme of things. Twitter has been absorbed into his AI company some time ago. SpaceX is a big business. And despite the decline, Tesla is also still a big business. Both generate quite a few billions in revenue. The staggering amount of money Elon Musk raised for doing AI stuff is quite a bit more than what he ever expended on the Twitter value implosion. I think we can…
> X.ai is controversial mainly because of Musk. But if you can look beyond that, it does actually have a bit of non trivial IP. Grok is not bad as a LLM.
the problem is that this market becomes commoditized, there are tons of not bad open weight LLMs available, and it is not clear if Grok IP is that not trivial. They even totally can run others LLMs under the hood, it is well known that they used Claude output at the beginning.
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#978SpaceX 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.
SpaceX is slated to go public some time this year - June IIRC The biggest selling point /was/ that Musk was being managed there, he wasn't tinkering with SpaceX like Twitter or Tesla, and his foolhardy direction was kept out of the company. BUT, like Tesla, Musk cannot help himself and is making SpaceX look like a very bad investment - tying his other interests with SpaceX, allegedly using SpaceX money as a "war ches…
I think Musk is just that obsessed with his mission of reversing social progress and controlling the direction of the world, using the anti-woke combination of xAI and Twitter. He knows that tying them to SpaceX will hurt its IPO, but now they're part of an entity that's too essential to fail.
They're also probably rushing out the IPO to beat the bubble pop. I think everyone earlier expected to keep the bubble going a few more years, that's why they made all those circular deals. But then Trump spooked Europe into possibly scaling back US investments and decoupling from US tech. So now you have an unsure Nvidia walking back their OpenAI deal, etc.
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#979Too me this smells of projected cash desperation. Do people actually pay for Grok?
I have clients that have X Premium+ accounts for their businesses and I use Grok that way. The biggest factor with Grok is the censorship which runs both ways. OTOH it allows for bad shit (recent X porn images), but it also allows less nannying in regular queries -- for instance I was looking for a source for a magazine from 80s which is 40 years defunct, and all the other LLMs chided me for trying to commit "copyright infringement" whereas Grok gave me a list of useful sites.
Re: xAI joins SpaceX
#980Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only people who never interacted with data center reliability think it's doable to maintain servers with no human intervention.
You are right. But in the future we'll be refueling the satellites anyway. Might as well maintain the servers using robots all in one go.
Right now that’s not the case. Satellites just store whatever fuel they need for orbital adjustments and by default, they fall back to earth and burn up at the end of their life. All the Starlink satellites are configured to fall back to earth within 5 years (the fuel is used to re-raise their orbit). The new proposed datacenters would sit in a higher orbit to avoid debris, allegedly, but that means it is even more expensive to get to them and refuel them, and the potential for future debris is far worse (since it wouldn’t fall back to earth and burn up for centuries or millennia).