Let’s not forget, xAI is the parent of Twitter/X (the social network). So now, taxpayers are paying to keep Twitter/X alive. After all, it is taxpayer money going to the contracts the government gives SpaceX for launches. Nice way to subsidize what is effectively a one sided campaign machine for the GOP and far right.
You don't have to think they have the best models of course, but they are clearly a very significant, and some might argue, leading player in the AI race.
So no, I wouldn’t say Elon is a major player in the AI space. People use his models because they are cheap and are willing to undress people’s photos.
I think that is also likely, unless Tesla can stage a major turnaround, it is going to be beaten by Chinese competitors nearly everywhere that they are allowed (which is everywhere but the USA.)
What is this argument exactly? What are they leading?
That's the full stack? Only other player that vertically setup is facebook, google and microsoft.
We also know the Twitter buyout debt was sold at near par before the merger with xAI which is inconsistent with being near bankruptcy.
My understanding is that it was not oversubscribed and would not have closed without Tesla’s investment.
My guess is "that they did the math" and had an engineering study which convinced them that getting AI datacenters into space will make sense.
It's also not hard to imagine why, the process alone once perfected could be reused for asteroid mining for example, then mirogravity manufacturing, either of which alone would be enormous capital intensive projects. Even if AI dataenters in space are break-even it would be a massive win for SpaceX and leave their competition far behind.
Your sources might be shady (Elektrek?).
There is no benefit to putting data centers in space versus the giant cost that you would incur by doing so.
Can people please try and use their fucking brains for a second?
Have you considered that people smarter than you think it is plausible?
I know many people smarter than me, plenty of them who have spent careers building data centers, and not one of them think this is plausible.
You should consider whether people smarter than the average investor are pulling a fast one.
I don't doubt spacex can fail at this.
I also don't doubt we are fairly close to making this plausible.
> plenty of them who have spent careers building data centers
Famously, plenty of people who have spent careers building rockets would swear that reusable rockets would absolutely never work.
I wish I had your confidence about everything!
Maybe you should doubt that. There's literally no reason to think this is plausible besides some hype merchants' say-so.
Please come back to reality.
Excluding Spacex:
Nvidia, Google, China, European Commission, Blue Origin
And this being HN, a YC funded company has put a single GPU rack in space and demonstrated training a reasonable sized model on it.
But yeah, it's all hype, sure.
Instead you put your confidence in Elon, who has zero expertise in this area?
It's trivial to understand why this is all hype if you pay attention to physics, as another commenter suggested earlier.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan%E2%80%93Boltzmann_law
Assume you're radiating away the heat for a single B200 (~1kW), and the max radiator temp is 100C, you find A = ~3m^2.
So that's 3 square meters per GPU. Now if you take into account that the largest planar structure deployed into space is ~3k m^2 (https://investors.lockheedmartin.com/news-releases/news-rele...), you're looking at 1000 GPUs.
That's a single aisle in a terrestrial data center.
Cost to deploy on earth vs satellite is left as an exercise to the reader.
No, I put confidence my ability to do a web search, pretty rare skill nowadays ;)
You'll see that none of these are Elon/spacex, hopefully?
https://medium.com/@cognidownunder/google-just-announced-the...
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/starcloud
https://www.informationweek.com/it-infrastructure/lunar-data...
You do not radiate all the heat away from a GPU, a modern GPU can run pretty hot. Also look up how this is getting better for the next generation of GPUs.
Maybe repeat your calculation with updated assumptions?
But even if you were completely right, your argument is that we can't do this tomorrow, yes I agree. Typical technology development cycles are about 5-10 years.
Fascinating. Tell me more.
Where does the heat energy that isn't radiated away go?
LOL. If you don't radiate the heat the spacecraft just gets indefinitely hotter (until it glows and the heat is forcibly irradiated). It's space, there's no fluid to provide convection.
Tesla will have to lose its meme status first, otherwise they would be paying real money to make the acquisition close. The other acquisitions are using VC valuations which Musk has a big hand in. Matt Levine did a whole thing on it when xAI acquired X.