Elon Musk Is Rolling xAI Into SpaceX—Creating the World’s Most Valuable Private Company
4mon 15d ago by lemmy.sdf.org/u/some_guy in technology from www.wired.com
In a blog post, Musk said the acquisition was warranted because global electricity demand for AI cannot be met with “terrestrial solutions,” and Silicon Valley will soon need to build data centers in space to power its AI ambitions.
This dumb fuck. Unfortunately, his boosters will be all-in on this messaging. Whatever.
Someone needed a distraction from his name appearing all over the Epstein files
Every article needs to read "Elon Musk, who's name repeatedly appeared in the Epstein files"
Financial trickery is what this is. Rolling one failing business into the next, Tesla will follow soon. It's incredible that this is even legal, but of course nothing matters anymore in Trump's America.
The stupid thing is that it‘s perfectly legal as long as nobody looks into it and because it‘s a US corporation nobody will look into it.
this is it
supporting the share price long enough he can sell as much as possible
Is he actually selling shares? Imo this move might actually be more about gaining more control percentage wise.
Similar to how he increased his control when he folded Twitter into xAI (at a imo very favorable valuation for him), which gave him a larger share of the combined company.
If he merges space x and xAI (especially at a high valuation of the latter), he would own more of the combined company as he owns more of xAI then space x.
For me the only surprising thing is how existing shareholders seemingly just let him dictate these mergers and valuations. But I guess they face a dilemma where valuation depend so much on Elon that they have to play by his rules or risk loosing even more.
"...creating the world's most overvalued private company."
FTFY.
I'm not really convinced SpaceX was over valued IF Starship succeeds, but every single part of xAi was.
And also, that’s a pretty big if!
For sure. I don't doubt they'll get it functional and getting payloads to space, but the entire premise is on full rapid reuseability, including same day relaunch of starship. That is still a very very very big if.
If they can't get to that point, it's not worth anywhere near what it is being predicted to be worth.
Bullshit. He’s playing move the debt around.
Absolutely. And if the AI market takes a hit it will barely affect a government contracted space program that will get a taxpayer funded bailout if it has any trouble at all.
They don't always bail them out. Sometimes they force sell them to their competitors.
The richest man on Earth will absolutely get a bailout on our dime and not spend a cent of his net worth.
Yup. Who's in charge of determining if he gets bailed out? How much money does each of them need to say yes?
Oh, they won't take money? What influence does he need to buy?
For the amount of money he's set to get, there's noone that'll turn down a nice gift of some sort.
You mean that guy who desperately tried to invite himself to an island to rape kids, but was deemed too big of a weirdo and jackass?
Yeah cool, go AI rockets or whatever.
I guess do feel bad for the innovators and engineers that are doing actual cool shit in his companies. Must suck to be downstream of that shithead. So much potential, so much stigma (for the company, not the pedo fuckhead)
Spacex had a team of people who would cosplay as engineers and be enough of a distraction that it would distract him from meddling with anything really important. He's mostly whittled away the leadership that protected the company from him these days
Can we also take a moment to acknowledge how utterly unhinged this part is?
"This marks not just the next chapter, but the next book in SpaceX and xAI's mission: scaling to make a sentient sun to understand the Universe and extend the light of consciousness to the stars!"
yeah wtf.... a sentient sun? First of all, how do we know the sun isn't sentient? And if it was/is why assume it would give a shit about humanity?
But also wtf... Like, he's trying to merge the sun with AI? Am I taking it too literally? He's trying to create god? So he can ask for forgiveness for being a pedo pos?
It's a bunch of technobabble loosely related to his harebrained scheme to launch a fuckload of solar powered AI servers into LEO.
Okay, so I am taking it too literally because he's not even trying to be accurate with the description. What a weirdo.
“Sentience” is like this hand-waving magic word. Defined typically as the ability to experience sensations and feelings, it’s very anthropic and egocentric.
We know that life evolved on Earth, to include our own species. We know that much life on Earth has an internal sense for pain and pleasure, as well as many instinctual drives like self-preservation. We know that our species knows things, and we know that other species don’t have the same depth in their capacity to know things. We’ve demonstrated that other species don’t seem to understand the world in the same way as us humans. Yet, we’ve never quite figured out what any other species knows. We’ve never modeled their form of sentience, let alone our own. We only really know about sentience intuitively, via our own experience. We judge everything’s capacity as though it’s either less than, equal to, or greater than our own — without consideration for how something might just be different. Not higher or lower, but parallel in a way.
I don’t know what sun sentience would be like, not any more than I already know why any sentience is like (beside my own), but I can say one thing for sure. Our own sentience is heavily influenced by bias: social, political, legal, economical, financial, emotional, religious, moral, and scientific bias. Peel back those layers of bias, what’s left? Sun sentience might be something like that, like a blank slate that just exists.
Big tangent, but I just want to say I love this reply, and it's a great example of what reddit has lost and lemmy has preserved.
Speaking of other species and knowledge, whale songs IMO are something like the dialup sound we used to hear when our internet went over the land line. Apparently they can hear each other from an ocean away as well. Whales may have entire religions for all we know. It's fascinating to think about, and they're right here on this planet with us; the Sun only knows what else is out there.
The sun is not only sentient, but sapient and aware of it's eternal damnation; be thankful you can't hear it screaming.
if there was a infinite line, like so:
<——sentient——sapient——>
… where it marks each stage of “awareness,” where would you personally think humans go on that line?
If you think it belongs over the “sapient” point, I’d think that’s very interesting. Isn’t it also interesting that we bond most well with animals that exhibit human-like social behavior?
He probably used AI to generate a mission statement for the merged company.
Any sort of universal god would not care about the daily life of bacteria on a piece of dust in an unimaginably larger system.
Exactly.
Though, if life is truly rare, they may value us for that reason, but there's no reason to believe they'd improve anything for us.
Yeah it's a coin toss whether they would want to check us out further, or use the galactic form of chlorine on the area.
But odds are they would neither specifically know nor care. In likelihood I imagine there is other life, and not all based on carbon and water. There could be life on gas giants, even on suns, based on completely different chemical interactions.
I also think about this a lot. For all we know the storm on Jupiter could be thinking.
Even humble life on it's moons, living with ammonia in it's blood or something, as they found on titan. Lakes of methane, with methane rain replete with lightning. Volcanic eruptions of water mixed with ammonia that kept it from freezing and had it in a semi solid molten state at -200 degrees f or whatever it is. From the probe landed there, forget when that was, on titan. But life could exist even there, even if not higher life, they do have liquid bodies. That is the factor for life, the right liquid to gas temperature changes with the right chemical reactions, and the spar of zeus.
I disagree completely, and I am not a believer in any god. You care about things as a human, but (should a god exist) don’t you think it a step too far to assume a gods experience would be anything at all like our own? Whether it cares or doesn’t may be the wrong question entirely — too anthropic of a question. Even if it did have the human sense of care in its faculty of psychology, something that may entirely be a social construct, then wouldn’t it equally so be arrogant to assume what a creator does/not care about? A creator might care a lot about you, and sees suffering as some kind of tough love… who the hell can say? The universe could be infinite, and that could simply be a preference in design. Who the hell can say?
God isn’t our enemy, whether or not it exists. Our enemy is the people who claim to speak for god.
What I'm trying to say is I believe in the utterly indifferent god. It likely neither knows nor cares about us. We would go to church about it, but what's the point?
We do not have all the answers, and we should accept that, from our position on this speck of dust in the unimaginably larger system we live amongst, we should just embrace that we don't know everything, despite the experts telling us affirmatively the age and size of the universe as if they could know, or the religious leaders espousing ideas the age of reason has proven to be wrong.
Part of wisdom is accepting what you don't, and what you can't know.
I don't really disagree with much of what your responded with however. Creator is a nebulous term. Creating biological machines that evolve to meet their conditions become rather removed from those creators if separated by unimaginable large distances between solar systems. There is no way any being seeding life would survive to watching it evolve over billions of years, even if some form of transport could break the speed of light, which I believe to be impossible.
Yeah, I’m agreeing with you more now.
I’ve thought a lot about god and decided that, even if it does exist, my best way to honor it would be to live my life honestly and freely as though it does not exist.
I’ve considered the argument about the size of the universe, with us being specks of dust in all of that…that perspective does make us seem insignificant, until (IMO) you consider that we humans (as far as we know) are the only species in the whole universe that even tries to worship a god. We’re matter that asks about morals, and it’s possible you might only find that here on Earth. Given, we’re the center of the epistemological universe — not the ontological one.
I’m not saying that’s necessarily true. I am saying, however, that there are angles which make us more significant even in this big universe.
Personally, I like to think of God as being the first thing that could move. It very well may be explained as a quirk of quantum mechanics that results in the state of nothing being inherently unstable — allowing for something to arise. We are beings of that something which this mechanic produced, and that’s godly enough (relative to me) for me.
Again, I’m not saying that’s what god is necessarily. That’s just how I think about it.
A couple short stories on the matter:
Is there a god? (Less than a page, but says it all)
Dwan Ev ceremoniously soldered the final connection with gold. The eyes of a dozen television cameras watched him and the subether bore throughout the universe a dozen pictures of what he was doing. He straightened and nodded to Dwar Reyn, then moved to a position beside the switch that would complete the contact when he threw it. The switch that would connect, all at once, all of the monster computing machines of all the populated planets in the universe -- ninety-six billion planets -- into the supercircuit that would connect them all into one supercalculator, one cybernetics machine that would combine all the knowledge of all the galaxies. Dwar Reyn spoke briefly to the watching and listening trillions. Then after a moment's silence he said, "Now, Dwar Ev." Dwar Ev threw the switch. There was a mighty hum, the surge of power from ninety-six billion planets. Lights flashed and quieted along the miles-long panel. Dwar Ev stepped back and drew a deep breath. "The honor of asking the first question is yours, Dwar Reyn." "Thank you," said Dwar Reyn. "It shall be a question which no single cybernetics machine has been able to answer." He turned to face the machine. "Is there a God?" The mighty voice answered without hesitation, without the clicking of a single relay. "Yes, now there is a God." Sudden fear flashed on the face of Dwar Ev. He leaped to grab the switch. A bolt of lightning from the cloudless sky struck him down and fused the switch shut.
(Fredric Brown, "Answer")
Or
The Last Question - Isaac Asimov
Dude, that’s talos principle. You aren’t clever.
They didn't say that did they? Jesus, yeah, that's what they are doing, not playing the biggest confidence scam in the world.
The government will not let SpaceX fail, it’s a strategic asset and Musk knows this. He is going to tie his Xai to it and saddle it with all the debt it is incurring. When the AI bubble pops he will be able to ask for bail outs to keep SpaceX afloat.
Companies that are too big to fail and need a bail out, should be automatically nationalised.
"B-b-but that will stifle innovation!"
It will most certainly stifle innovative ways to leech more profit while the taxpayer is left holding the bag.
Ah, who am I kidding? They'll find something new. It will just spark more innovation.
*Automatically nationalized and leadership at those companies should be investigated and tried for fraud.
These CEOs need to take accountability not a golden parachute. They know when a business is failing and when they are defrauding investors and the public.
Ding ding ding!
That the reason behind all the AI datacenters in space hubub? Makes sense. The usual "subsidize the losses" strategy.
I could have seen the opposite, too, where xAI pays spaceX gobs of money for tons of datacenter launches in advance, bubble pops, xAI goes under and spaceX still has the money. But ya I think this is "the govt won't let spaceX fail, pile all the riskiest shit into that"
We NEED Datacenters in SPACE so we can Make Better CHILD PORN with GROK!
Putting AI datacenters in space has got to the be dumbest idea conceived by Elon yet. There has to be several dozen engineering challenges to even make that happen and when all is said and done it would make absolutely no financial sense to actually do it. This is just yet another attempt by Elon to hype up spacex for an IPO. It's a very poor attempt at that.
EDIT (1 day after initial comment): There is one angle I didn't think of yesterday but just dawned on me. Now that Twitter office was raided by authorities in France, perhaps Elon thinks he can put datacenters in space to get around the jurisdictions of countries. He might be thinking by putting datacenter in space that can beam data directly through starlink he can basically side step local law. He may think by having CSAM generating datacenters in space it can't be raided and be shut down easily by terrestrial law enforcement. Obviously this is not how law and law enforcement works but I think there is a decent chance Elon is dumb enough to think his idea would work.
it's getting hard to differentiate his ideas that are intentionally scams and his ideas that are just ketamine fueled insanity
You would have really liked the comedian we saw last night. Epstein files were the main topic. Sammy Obeid. Good stuff.
Isn't heat management like one of the stickiest problems in long term space travel? Bc a vacuum doesn't have anything it can transfer heat to so it can't cool down. And this guy wants to establish data centers for which heat management is also its biggest problem.
Heat dissipation was my very first thought. Musk's whole premise is absolute horseshit with modern and even near-future tech.
It's not a problem like "get heavy thing off ground", where we can study principles of lift, throw fossil fuels at rocketry, etc. There is no magic bullet for "move this massive amount of heat somewhere else"; entropy has too much to say on the subject.
There is no magic bullet for “move this massive amount of heat somewhere else”
Space does let you dissipate heat via radiation (just not convection or conduction). Space radiators are a well understood and often-used technology.
The problem with space data centers isn't the technology, we have the technology. It's the cost. Everything in space is orders of magnitude more expensive than terrestrially. It's simply not economically feasible to build a data center in space when you can build hundreds for the same cost on Earth.
yes but DNS is terrestrial, so you could just ban the web portals and apps on earth.
Yes you could VPN to a non-compliant country, but you can already do that without a spater spenter
Space is the worst place for high powered servers because of all the heat involved along with the inability to perform maintenance. It's just a grift, it will not be profitable to put HPC GPUs in orbit.
Please reboot the server, on site.
That's what the AI (Actual Indians) controlled robots will be for
I know someone who should try that in the company who try it without a space suite.
In a blog post, Musk said the acquisition was warranted because global electricity demand for AI cannot be met with “terrestrial solutions,” and Silicon Valley will soon need to build data centers in space to power its AI ambitions.
Lololololol
Dumbass McScammer at it again. His starship still can't even bring a fucking banana to LEO but sure, pets move entire datacenters there.
He has lied about everything for decades now, this too, ain't gonna happen.
Not to mention the MASSIVE drawbacks to having data centers in space. The guy is going to ruin SpaceX, too.
I'm really trying to think of a single upside to putting it in space. Unfiltered solar power, does that matter at all? Not that you would ever break even on the cost.
Imagine his dumb goober voice
“Ackshually - it’s it’s it’s quite cool in space - practically near a useful enough temperature for graphic processing units to dissipate heat”
Lol yeah... not how that works at all
I had to try it
Amazing
No seriously trust him he is going to build automatic driving cars for robots that are going to be catapulted to space with the skills to create networks and datacenters that can transmit with useable latency across the void of space so we can get ads for the McDonalds app on his totally cool microblogging website all powered by the sun.
The earth will be a fireball, but the McDonalds will be only 99% or less microplastic.
Valuable to whom?
hopefully his shitty AI will tank his nazi rockets. one can only hope.
It kind of sucks because the people working at spaceX are actually doing great things as a whole.
Just sucks a person like muskrat is the face of it.
They should work for NASA instead.
NASA has contracted out basically all their rockets. We need spacex. Elon needs to be in jail. If only for threatening national security with this dumb move. Never mind being a Nazi and election interference.
Republicans keep gutting the NASA budget.
Yes, go work for the shithead nazi government instead of the shithead nazi private company...
Pretty sure NASA is not run by Nazis, are you good?
HA!
You should look into where the Nazi rocket scientists went after WW2 and how few of them saw any form of punishment for their involvement.
And that doesn't even take into account the pseudo-Nazis running the current US government, which is certainly what the other poster was talking about.
Nazis and NASA are like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
This is, at least, a better written take
Oh, so NASA os not qctually a government agency? Neat...when did they separate out from the government, I must have missed that
The people at SpaceX are poisoning landscapes that used to be neighborhoods with toxic waste because the company doesn‘t give a shit about the environment, people or the planet. Fuck whoever works at SpaceX and partakes in this. Oh, they‘re also making Musk even more powerful so that‘s a double L.
I’m gonna need a source for that. I follow SpaceX fairly closely (as a fan of the engineering, not Musk), and I can’t think of where this could possibly be happening, even through a wild misunderstanding of a situation.
Oh, that. If you read the article, you’ll see that the “toxic waste” was really just used water from the deluge system. Think of it like rinsing off your car and the runoff getting into a river. A good chunk of the water was collected too, so the actual discharge was much less. On top of that, it was later clarified that SpaceX could continue the operations while the permit process was sorted out, which happened a few months after that article IIRC. It was basically a nothingburger that a few commentators tried to blow up.
SpaceX wrote in its July permit application — under the header Specific Testing Requirements — Table 2 for Outfall: 001 — that its mercury concentration at one outfall location was 113 micrograms per liter. Water quality criteria in the state calls for levels no higher than 2.1 micrograms per liter for acute aquatic toxicity and much lower levels for human health
Cool, you can drink the mercury water, but I'll pass thanks.
Agreed. I just got banned from techtakes for pointing this out but the Falcon 9 rocket is the most reliable launch vehicle today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_orbital_launch_systems
Space solar panels and datacenters is pure fraud. Merger is purely to ruin one established company with revenue, mostly government funded, with an anchor to sink it, but help mecha hitler control skynet.
I used to think space data centers was a scam, but I learned how much power existing satellites already use (and thus must be able to radiate into space to keep cold), and just looking at the ISS, each radiator (and it has several) can reject 14 kW into space, so if the ISS has can safely generate 14 kW of electricity and reject all the waste heat, then the major concern for me is addressed. Space datacenters are the first step to industry, in space, which is an necessary step for a lot of future stuff.
All the above is beyond the point though, he's playing shell games to tie his most valuable and critical company, SpaceX, to the trashheap of AI bullshit so that the government will bail him out when it crashes.
But data centers use tens to hundreds of megawatts. So we’re talking about thousands or tens of thousands of times the heat.
That was my stumbling block, too. Don't think of it as taking a datacenter and putting it into space whole, think of it as taking 5 or 10 racks and putting that into space, and repeating till you have as much compute as a datacenter. So it's basically the size of a schoolbus (same size as hubble telescope) and it has solar panels+ heat rejection like those of the ISS, and then bolt a starlink on the end, and you can put as many of those in orbit as you need.
Each part of the hardware is doable(ish), and if the nerds who actually run datacenters say the terrestrial energy/cooling cost numbers vs launch cost numbers make sense, I'm inclined to believe them even if I don't get to see that math specifically. But right now it's just AI bros saying the costs make sense, and I don't as much believe them.
Yay! Unlimited space junk!
You’re right, but I don’t mind if he sends his stuff to outer space
14 kW of electricity and reject all the waste heat, then the major concern for me is addressed.
This is a tiny amount of power. My house alone has over 3x that (I have 48 kW of electric service). Feeding my house with 48 kW and dissipating the heat is MUCH MUCH MUCH cheaper than doing this on the ISS not once, not twice, but thrice on this ISS....just to achieve what my home achieves right now. And don't think this is some odd amount for a home, this is a basic 200A home service line.
Space datacenters are a meme.
You don't use 48 kW you have 48kW capacity, that'd be 33 (1500W) electric space heaters running nonstop 24/7. I have electric heat, electric oven/range, and an electric car and I averaged 3 kW across the last week. (406 kWh between the 26th and 1st)
A comparison that is reasonable is an h100 rack cluster like this which uses about 60 kW per rack. For input power, the newer iROSA solar panels generate about 20 kW at a size of 20ft x 60ft each. Throw in 4 of those radiators, and you have something that is feasible to throw into space. Again, I can't judge the economics of launching and running a space based datacenter business, but you could absolutely launch and operate a space rack with current tech.
The ISS is one of the most expensive pieces of infrastructure humanity has built, it costs something on the order of $150B. My home I personally paid for, out of my own pocket, and it has 3x the power power supply of the ISS.
How about this. You give me 10% of the cost of the ISS and that datacenter rack, and I'll use the $15,000,000,000 to buy a big AC system to cool the rack. We both make out. You paid 10x less and got 3x as much power capacity, and I got FIFTEEN BILLION DOLLARS to service and maintain a residential sized power line.
you could absolutely launch and operate a space rack with current tech
If you aren't getting what I'm laying down. The issue isn't the technology, the issue is the many orders of magnitude of extra cost.
If your argument was one of cost, you should have said so from the start! Economically, it might or might not make sense. I can't pretend to know the economics of running a space based datacenter, I've never run a ground based datacenter.
But you have been arguing about power and electricity and heat and how proud you are to have 200a service at your house (congrats on owning it, btw, tough nowadays) but those aren't the dealbreakers. If the AI bros want to lose billions putting the datacenters in space, I don't have a huge problem with that. Better that than diddling kids and destroying society, which is what they seem to be spending their money on now.
The iss is an experiment rather than a commercially justifyable operation. While spacex aims to achieve 200$/kg launch costs, that means 17c/kwh just in launch costs. Space solar and radiator panels are in the $1000/m2 cost.
The ISS is only in low orbit.
One day soon he’ll run out of companies to eat each other and the creditor bill will come due.
I wonder which American taxpayers will foot the bill?
All of them!
Because the rich can’t technically be taxpayers if they don’t pay in the first place.
Odd to say that while referring to Musk, a person who famously paid the most taxes by any individual ever in a year; over >$10B in a single year.
I don’t think that what he’s famous for.
This is following the rules because the rules are written by the rich to benefit the rich. Countries need wealth taxes and more equitable policies on unrealized gains.
Company with largest stock valuation
=/=
Most valuable company
So he decided to ruin his one successful company. Which is successful because he wasn't involved in running it until now.
Hide the company losing money in the company making money. He has done this before.
And I’m sure this has nothing to do with grok on X creating CA.
Doesn't this have the potential to backfire in light of things like the lawsuits in France? Before just xAI would have been liable, but now isn't SpaceX is also liable for generative AI CP?
Works for me. Take them all down.
How long until he rebrands Tesla to X Automobiles?
Naming everything to "X" is a cartoon villain move, except we don't have a superhero to fight him.
What advantage does space provide at all?
You have to transport heavy great into a place with no cooling capacity... What?
No advantage, in fact a massive disadvantage.
Fascists lie.
mainly no red tape trying to connect to a power grid, plus "free" solar power.
We have “free” solar here on Earth.
for half a day yeah, minus clouds etc. That requires expensive batteries or grid power especially in winter.
In space the idea is to use orbits where they can catch 24 hours of sun.
No cooling capacity? Isn't it the extreme opposite?
No, it's pretty hard to get rid of heat in space, vacuum is a very good insulator. The only way is radiation.
Thanks
No, space isn’t cold it’s empty. You need something to conduct away the heat, otherwise all you can do is passively radiate it
Fascinating. Will look more into it to understand.
I think Scott Manly might have had a video on it (data enter in space) recently. I saw it on a feed but haven't watched it. I'm sure he would mention the issues with heat removal.
TLDW: cooling's fine if you use starlink V2 size and power (which is not very suitable for AI 'datacentre' use) because it works already.
This is not about a few huge datacentres, it's about a million small ones. There’s 99 problems with this (see Kessler syndrome !, radiation, …), cooling isn’t (much of) one.
Doesn't matter anyway, it just has to be vaguely plausible for a stock IPO pump (and dump) scheme while sweeping all that xAI debt under the rug.
https://youtu.be/d-YcVLq98Ew&t=8m24s
Doesn't say why a vacuum cannot conduct heat though, but it makes sense to me now anyhow. Heat is vibrating molecules so to mitigate the vibration you need adjacent molecules which aren't vibrating as much.
Read the traveller sourcebooks, they especially for the ship designs. Good stuff
Welcome to middle school physics.
Don't be a dick. Not everyone remembers everything they did in middle school.
What if we put the pedophilia...in space??
Better check the capsule for kids first... "this is the one thing we didn't want to happen"
It's not illegal there?
Ugh... I can't believe i actually typed that out
I'm...actually not sure how the rules would apply, how far up various airspaces go or if it's an Antarctica kinda deal.
Pretty sure he'd been violating all sorts of human trafficking laws tho
Datacenters on the bottom of the sea are useless because of the difficulties of hardware maintenance and the snake oil salesman is trying to sell out space datacenters now.
Salt water is a bitch.
The point of these being in space is there is no maintenance.
Like they aren't doing maintenance on any starlink satellite.
Space X should be confiscated and rolled into NASA. We the American taxpayers pay for this lunatic nonsense because of Reagan and the neoliberal that followed. all the profits are privatized and funneled to a South African Zionist Nazi pedofile. When the US had public services everything wasn’t a scam like it is now. Using our tax dollars to “privatize” everything is what ruined the country
Nationalize it. Take his company, his wealth and jail him for his crimes.
Makes sense. Wants the bailouts when it all crashes, doesn't want terrestrial data center regulations so he can get away with whatever.
Definitely getting bail outs when it fails. Fucking plutocracy sucks, privatized profits, socialized losses.
If xAI disappeared tomorrow, literally nothing of value would have been lost. I'm not sure who would even notice immediately as I still have never met a single human being in real life who personally uses X.
where is the regulation
Same place as the bill of rights.
Bobs : “What is it you do?”
Elon : "Well--well look. I already told you: I deal with the god damn customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people? "
"Now they have to bail me out."
Grok the primary fuel flow regulator is showing a red light, what's wrong with it?
I'm sorry Dave. I can't do that.
This seems like a good way to turn a golden goose into a turducken. Elon really needed some of Aesop's fables in his upbringing.
Arrest this pedo
It's all a scam that would be investigated in normal times. Tesla's cars and robots will need AI to function (albeit xAI seems to be failing spectacularly), and xAI is hemorrhaging cash, but he loses leverage over Tesla's board if the AI division went to the Tesla. SpaceX investors should be pissed they're going to be carrying it now, and Tesla investors should be pissed as well.
No one has said this is how Elysium starts?
This is how Elysium starts.
Elysium actually had some semblance of working technology, though.
Something something torment nexus something something.
A million satellites he says. That's 100 satellites per starship launch. 5 times per day, every day, for five years. By the time you're done, the first ones are burned out and you have to do it all again. And that's assuming one GPU per satellite because solar panels even in space can't pull enough power to feed multiple of those hungry things.
Energy is the least of their concerns, getting rid of the heat is a much bigger problem.
Radiators in space are a proven tech. In practice that just means more expensive to build and launch.
Yeah it is a proven tech but requires quite a lot of space/weight and usually when satellites get the most energy from solar panels they also "generate" the most heat.
But space is cold
It's a vacuum. Which means that there aren't atoms to get hot or cold. Which means there is no medium with which to exchange heat to cool something down, unless you are willing to bring a bunch of your own air to blow over the servers and then vent into space. Which means bringing an awful lot of air with you.
A server sitting in the vacuum of space would quickly over heat for lack of ventilation (if it didn't get destroyed because it wasn't structurally engineered to run in a vacuum).
I wasn't being serious by the way, but thanks for the detailed explanation of why, always appreciated to know the actual ins and outs no matter the topic.
Wait, I just did some research and it turns out I'm partially wrong about this.
While I am correct that you can't cool in the way we do on earth by bringing cool air to carry away the heat, there is another way to cool things as used by space stations and satellites.
That is you can take the heat and radiate it into space as Infrared radiation. IR radiation is able to travel through space as it is made of photons.
Indeed now that I think about it, that's why how our FLIR detectors work on earth too. They can measure the infrared radiation that is one of the 2 ways things vent heat even on earth (the second being by exchanging heat with another fluid such as air or water or something more exotic). It turns out that about ~1/3 of radiation from a radiator is actually infrared light while the other ~2/3 is fluid heat exchange, usually with air.
So I am wrong. I'm not sure how effective this would be for the amount of heat generated by servers, but it's not actually fully disqualified as I thought it would be.
That is you can take the heat and radiate it into space as Infrared radiation. IR radiation is able to travel through space as it is made of photons.
I'm not sure how effective this would be for the amount of heat generated by servers, but it's not actually fully disqualified as I thought it would be.
This is how the International Space Station deals with waste heat: https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/473486main_iss_atcs_overview.pdf
It's very slow compared with convective cooling, definitely not practical for running any high-powered computer hardware, slow enough that it can be considered disqualified.
Some back of the envelope: An ideal black-body at 100 C will radiate something like a kW pr m2, give or take. So one h100 at 700W(?) would probably need a reflector of around one m2. Very rough but it’s probably within an order of magnitude so it’s not impossible, but just adds to the engineering and logistics challenges.
Very expensive solar and radiative panels. Need 3x radiator area to solar. Also need to launch them
So we really need to make gpus out of materials that can glow white hot, slap them over the outside of enormous space data centres, then point them as earth and sell the blinding light as space billboards /s
Space feels cold if you have some fluid to evaporate, like blood or something. But servers will very quickly run out of whatever fluids they have if they tried this. (And so would you in their place.)
The only option to sustainably lose heat in space is radiation, which works, but is slow and limited in capacity, so these server satellites would need massive radiators. It's not impossible to do. ISS also has massive radiators.
So servers in space is possible. How big you can make an orbital server park, I don't know. I can imagine that with enough radiators, they start catching each other's heat, so there might be a limit to have many radiators you can put closely together, but I have no idea what that limit might be.
I guess this is insurance for when the bubble pops. It helps justify the "too big to fail"
“Valuable”
But that was the one place that hadn't been corrupted by capitalism!
How little of an understanding of how the natural world works do you need to have to think that data centers in space are a good idea? Nothing to say of economics and logistics. Or am I missing something big here?
Well there will be them there amazing Optimus robots on board to do all that maintenance, obviously. Don't worry, the great K has thought of all the angles, genius that he is and all.
Wow, that was harder to write than I thought it would be
It would require Von Neumann machines to do it. Of, course, we could end up being turned into grey goo with that sort of tech.
But, yeah, simply invent self-replicating nanotech. Shoot it at the moon, Mars, Ceres. Viola, data centers in space. Use the same tech to clean up the enviroment and eliminate oil dependence. Might as well rebuld the coral reefs and old growth forests. Also cures cancer and the common cold. And is the fountain of youth. And we all live happily ever after in the computer.
Uh oh, vibe-engineered rockets.
Doesn't one of those companies rely on government contracts? And now that company generates CSAM on demand?
Government contracts used to be their biggest revenue source, but it's Starlink now.
They still need the profits from government contracts though to help fund the capital expenditures to try and get starship working, but they aren't reliant on them like they used to be.
Starlink has been profitable for over a year.
They are burning money trying to get starship working now.
Well it's one thing if you don't want to trust information that comes out on something like Reuters or when Glenn Shotwell said it was entering into profitability, but it's another to continue to claim something otherwise like Starlink isn't sustainable and is burning VC money.
At this point, it would be best to either stay out of the conversation, or state something more like an opinion than come across as factual.
Edit: Just as an example in the future you could say something like, "I don't think Starlink would be sustainable without the current government Starlink contracts". I don't believe we have any information that would tell us if that's the case one way or another yet and could be true. Or "I don't trust the information available, so I don't think its actually sustainable or profitable'
Edit: Just to clarify sorry for extra edits - we do know for sure that Starlink is their largest revenue source though, and that retail / business customers make up the majority of their customers. I wouldn't doubt that the government starlink contracts have much better margins though and can skew profitability into uncertainty without them.
Fucking, Wired.
Suck daddy harder, Wired.
burying his losses.
100%. They've announced the plans for SpaceX to have an IPO, this will basically eliminate all of his losses even if they just shut down xAI immediately following acquisition (which they won't do just yet, because people are still bag holding AI investments.)
This guy might be a dumb fuck, but he's the smartest dumb fuck in the billionaire game.
Edit:
Some of his capital investors might have told him that they want out of xAI because they see where the wind is blowing. This gets them out with profit if they pull it off fast enough.
This (SpaceX IPO) is going to be a massive rug pull, for the 2nd round of public traders and I bet that he's got structure in place to ensure that even after selling billions of dollars of shares he still holds 51% or some shit, or that his annual compensation is $0+1% of the company.
10 years ago I would have bought into a SpaceX IPO. Not today.
I don't think he is dumb. He is without decency though. He doesn't care who he hurts and I have no doubt he will hurt a lot of people in the future.
Now if he rolls these into Tesla he’ll be on his way to ticking off one of the requirements to unlock his completely legitimate cagillion dollar pay package.
That agreement should have said excluding any acquisitions or mergers.
Cacadillo?! Is that like an armadillo, but poopie???
And it will all come crashing down
Data centers in space sounds like one hell of an expensive investment for something that has not once shown any profitability yet, and are in fact most likely about to burst its bubble in the near future.
No need for water or maintaining a clean room kinda useful.
No need for water
?
Kinda difficult to get water up there, it has to be conduction/radiation.
That doesn't answer the question of why you think servers having no access to water up there is a benefit.
It's an obstacle, not a solution to an obstacle.
Because we common folk need fresh water down here. They can innovate their own vapor chamber, the ISS is being cooled without water already.
You're doing mental gymnastics to make orbital server farms seem less stupid than they are. Why?
You do realise it's already being planned for execution right?
Are you rage baiting? I'm starting to like Lemmy's block feature but I don't know if you're doing this on purpose or by accident.
As michevious as it might be, here's a paper explaining the potential of using solar to run TPUs https://research.google/blog/exploring-a-space-based-scalable-ai-infrastructure-system-design/
Your entire half of this conversation is one big straw man argument.
Yeah, you've been wasting your time, missing the point. Read more carefully next time.
great place to store the expensive child porn generators. far away in space, where a molotov can never reach.
i fucking hate this timeline.
Or...he just tanked the value of both.
You see if you combine 2 bubbles, you’ll get an even bigger pop! Yay!
I fucking hate the speculative economy.
Time to break it up because it‘s a monopoly that spans over several industries for no good reason at all but oh wait the USA is a dysfunctional mess so nothing will be done about it.
One day we'll be shooting satellites out of the sky for sport
It's notoriously difficult to cool things in space. This'll be fun...
a good salesman would ride an ai guided rocket to mars.
Strapping a lead albatross to your space program is certainly a choice
Incredible there are people dumber than him giving him money when he says things like this. He is an absolute conman.
THERE’S NO INTERNET ON MARS
smoke screen. expect some mirrors
Bypass paywall:
AI and highly volatile fuel. What could possibly go wrong?
Smh
xAI business model: hype
SpaceX business model: government contracts
The contracts stay when the hype dies. By merging the two companies, Musk avoids the collapse of one. To make this work, he needs more government contracts - I see a lot of groveling and boot licking in his immediate future.
This capitalism looks and smells a lot like good old USSR style communism.
Nationalize his companies. And shoot his ass into space so he can go hang out with the roadster floating around the solar system.
Fuck that. Dissolve them.