Comment by Loughla
8 hours ago
Legitimately, did you not immediately conclude it was for financial shenanigans? What did you think? I'm not trying to be shitty, but what else could there be?
8 hours ago
Legitimately, did you not immediately conclude it was for financial shenanigans? What did you think? I'm not trying to be shitty, but what else could there be?
Well if they plan to put a crap ton of new satellites in the air specifically for running xAI on it, I think there is a decent chance that it isn't purely financial shenanigans. Obviously the finances are probably a big part of such a decision, but companies also do these kinds of things all the time. I don't see why this is considered "shenanigans" or how the quote would relate to what is happening.
see https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horri...
I'm gonna be honest, I really don't see how these opinion pieces are relevant. There are a lot of smart people working at these companies and I'm sure they have done a lot of research and work into determining that this is a viable thing to try. I am going to put more faith into that than somebodies opinion online.
It seems like a lot of people are very biased on this topic and want to see this fail because of who the company is. This author of this piece you linked appears to be both anti-AI and anti-Elon for example.
We also are unaware if there is some bigger strategy at play here and a bigger vision then what is currently being shared. I like to see companies try to innovate and take risks. I would like to try and be optimistic about things.
6 replies →
maybe I am a fool, does space-based AI make no sense at all?
Literally none. Space is the worst possible place to put something that overheats already on earth. There's probably some synergy in the other direction (AI piloting of satellites or whatever) but that's marginal at best.
I've sure they've considered that in the engineering. For example, the solar panels would shade it. The space station has a cooling system in it. Musk's Starlink satellites don't seem to be overheating.
7 replies →
So the whole space based data center thing is just a gimmick?
1 reply →
> maybe I am a fool, does space-based AI make no sense at all?
I think it does, for what it’s worth if we are to extend intelligence (as we know it) and potentially consciousness out there into the galaxy.
Because of distances and time, it is unlikely that humans will populate the galaxy with biological offspring (barring some technical breakthroughs that we have no line of sight on).
AI, on the other hand, could theoretically populate the galaxy and beyond, carrying the human intelligence and consciousness story into the future.
In, perhaps, a few hundred years.
Not sure if I feel comfortable with Mecha Hitler being our representative to the rest of the universe.
No. Imagine if your computer was in space instead of being under your desk. Would that solve anything?
Orbit is a very inconvenient environment. It's difficult to reach so maintenance is a nightmare, it's moving all the time, there's nowhere to sink waste heat into, you have a constrained power budget, you have a constrained weight budget. The only things you want to put in orbit are things that absolutely can't go anywhere else.
[dead]
it absolutely doesn't unless there's a magical unobtainium cooling tech Musk got his hands on
Watts=heat
Heat has nowhere to go in space. Read about how much engineering went into cooling the ISS and now multiply that by billions.
A lot of people who are a little bit ignorant think it's really easy to cool things in space because space is notoriously very cold.
Physics, it turns out, is slightly more complicated than this and it turns out vacuum is an incredibly good insulator and more (much more) than offsets the temperature differential in terms of how easy it is to cool something.
Thinking a bit, ORBITAL ai makes little to no sense, nowhere to dump your heat, your gpus are going to be slag or only operate part of the time. But what if he put them on the moon? the lag time is what ~1.2s? That seems like an amount of time that a current AI query can take and still seem reasonable.
Not that I think it's anything but him allowing some investors to cash out when spacex goes public. Hell didn't he just shift 2billion from tesla to xai?
At the end of the day he will never see whatever bullshit he's peddling in the media about this sale his drug habit is going to kill him before then.
Does the moon offer much heat dissipation potential vs. orbit? The lunar surface seems like an almost-as-harsh environment.
1 reply →