zlacker

>>g-mork+(OP)
> 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 percentage of the Sun's power. A few trillionths per year.

>>gok+h4
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 and have the space launch capability for all of it along with tons and tons of other stuff and the best he comes up with is...GPUs in orbit?

This is essentially the superhero gadget technology problem, where comic books and movies gloss over the the civilization changing implications of some technology the hero invents to punch bad guys harder. Don't get me wrong, the idea of orbiting data centers is kind of cool if we can pull it off. But being able to pull if off implies an ability to do a lot more interesting things. The problem is that this is both wildly overambitious and somehow incredibly myopic at the same time.

>>rainsf+RA
All right, so how is it that all you geniuses out here are totally right about this, but all the dullards at SpaceX and XAI, who have accomplished nothing compared to you lot, are somehow wrong about what they do every day?

I know being right without responsibility feels amazing but results are a brutal filter.

>>keepam+5W
What have the engineers at XAI accomplished? From the ground level, it seems they followed the same research all the other LLM chatbot companies did. They followed along and made a sassy mecha hitler who makes revenge porn.

XAI isn't a serious venture.

>>MSFT_E+J92
So, the much lauded xAI is overhyped, underwhelming and ... kind of evil? In stark contrast to every other AI company, I suppose?

And people are using it for revenge porn? I haven't seen that. I've just seen that grok pioneered really good deep web search, is less woke than other LLMs and grok imagine has really good video generation and pretty good image gen. Plus the X timeline feed is really good!

>>keepam+zz2
> And people are using it for revenge porn? I haven't seen that.

https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-bont...

https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/grok-says-safeguard...

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/09/technology/grok-deepfakes...

https://www.vogue.com/article/grok-deepfakes-trend-essay

https://www.the-independent.com/tech/ai-grok-twitter-fake-im...

https://techpolicy.press/the-policy-implications-of-groks-ma...

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/grok-s...

The French raided the X offices in Paris.

> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/03/french-he...

> It said the alleged offences it was investigating now included complicity in the possession and organised distribution of child abuse images, violation of image rights through sexualised deepfakes, and denial of crimes against humanity.