Comment by rswail
2 days ago
Aside from the economics, the question is why do it in orbit vs on land (or sea)?
What are the regulatory/legal gains? Lack of jurisdiction means open slather?
What are the national security gains? Redundancy and resiliency by each satellite being a "micro-compute" connected by high speed laser links? So more resilient to attack?
Why do it at all?
I think the only reason is for legal purpose.
If data is downloaded illegally from space, stored in space and model trained on it... it will be a mess juridically if someone complain.
Same for model inference, it will be hard for a government to put controls on the model output.
I think the main draw is its elegance. You have very efficient power from the sun, put that directly into your compute, radiate it out. Energy is ~free, no heavy infrastructure required, just a closed circuit for computing.
Elegance compared to a PV/Storage facility built next door to a data centre?
It doesn't make sense right now, and won't for at least 5-10 years.
By which time, this current round of hype will have burned up ~$1T if it doesn't fall apart from the current internal contradictions and lack of market/customers/uses.
We're still on the uphill ride of the Gartner hype cycle, not even at the "Peak of Inflated Expectations" yet.
We also have very efficient power from the sun here on earth. I don't get how that is an argument.