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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 th
by rainsford 9mo ago
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.
- byearthithatius 9mo agoSo what are the other things? You said he glossed over them and didn't mention a single one.
- aorloff 9mo agoReliably and efficiently transport energy generated in space back to earth, for starters Or let me guess, its going to be profitable to mine crypto in space (thereby solving the problem of transporting the "work" back to earth)
- mkull 9mo agoWhy would you transfer the energy to earth? The energy powers ai compute = $
- Sparyjerry 9mo agoDead on, You can transmit data to and from space and have the compute completed at potentially fractions of the cost.
- aorloff 9mo agoTell me about your cooling medium in space
- rlt 9mo agoA large piece of aluminum with ammonia pumped through it?
- aorloff 9mo agoNothing about this is sounding economically competitive with ground based solutions
- pyrale 9mo agoWhere does the heat collected by amminia get evacuated?
- littlestymaar 9mo agoThrough thermal radiation, it's called radiative cooling. But it's not trivial indeed, especially if you want good power density in your space data center.
- rlt 9mo agoNot sure why this is downvoted. Much cheaper to transfer data than energy.
- brd529 9mo agoOverview energy has done interesting work in this area.
- _fizz_buzz_ 9mo agoBeaming energy always sucks. Without some very fundamental discoveries in physics nobody will every make this work economically. This isn't just an engineering problem, it's a physics problem.
- mlyle 9mo agoBeaming energy does suck, but it might be something to do before we launch thousands of terawatts of GPUs to space.
- mlindner 9mo agoIt's always better to generate electricity on the ground than attempt to beam it to the ground from space. The efficiency loss of beamed power is huge.
- amluto 9mo agoThe efficiency loss of nighttime is approximately 100% if we’re talking about solar energy. At least at a most basic level, it’s not totally absurd to stick some kind of power beaming contraption in space where it is mostly not shadowed by the Earth and beam power to a ground station.
- hdjrudni 9mo agoIs that more or less absurd than making deals with our neighbours to share their electricity? Build some solar farms around the planet and then distribute it over wire. I honestly don't know the answer. I know there's some efficiency loss running over long wires too but I don't know what's more realistic.
- queenkjuul 9mo agoThere is absolutely nothing realistic about power transmission from space to earth, wired or wireless.
- mike_hearn 9mo agoIn theory you can do HVDC over long distances. In practice that doesn't help much. Power would normally want to run north to south (not gonna do HVDC across the oceans anytime soon), and so the terminator hits you at the same time everywhere. It's got to be batteries if you want PV at scale. The practical difficulties aren't really long distance transmission though. They're political and engineering. Spain had a massive blackout recently because a PV farm in the south west developed a timing glitch and they couldn't control the grid frequency - that nearly took out all of Europe and the power wasn't even being transmitted long distance! The level of trust you need to build a giant integrated continent-wide power grid is off the charts and it's not clear it's sustainable over the long run. E.g. the EU threatened to cut Britain's electricity supplies during Brexit as a negotiating tactic and that wasn't even war.
- SergeAx 9mo agoIf we (as in "civilization") were able to produce that many solar panels, we should cover all the deserts with them. It will also shift the local climate balance towards a more habitable ecosystem, enabling first vegetation and then slowly growing the rest of the food chain.
- DoctorOetker 9mo agofor solar panels that are say 25% efficient, that means 75% of optical energy is turned into heat, whereas the sand had a relatively high albedo, its going to significantly heat up the local environment!
- jacquesm 9mo agoThat is not what 25% efficiency means for solar panels.
- DoctorOetker 9mo agocare to expand on your comment? or are is this just remarking that some light was reflected?
- jacquesm 9mo agoNo. It is enough for me to see such a single ridiculous statement of such magnitude to discount the rest of your voluminous contributions to this thread.
- DoctorOetker 9mo agoI'm dumbfounded, most light incident on a solar panel is not reflected, so logically photons were absorbed, some generated useful electron hole pairs pushing current around the load loop, others recombined and produced heat. Its an entirely reasonable position in solar panel discussions to say that a 20% solar panel will heat as if 80% of the optical energy incident on the panel was turned into heat. Conservation of energy dictates that the input energy must equal the sum of the output work (useful energy) and output heat. Not sure what you are driving at here, and just calling a statement ridiculous does not explain your position.
- esseph 9mo agoThis is such a hypebeast paragraph. Datacenters in space are a TERRIBLE idea. Figure out how to get rid of the waste heat and get back to me.
- fnord77 9mo agoI agree that data centers in space is nuts. But I think there's solutions to the waste heat issue https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/goddard/engineers-solve-excessive-heat-removal-from-nasas-webb-telescope/ https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/goddard/engineer...
- boutell 9mo agoThat's a solution for minuscule amounts of heat that nevertheless disturb extremely sensitive scientific experiments. Using gold, no less. This does not scale to a crapton of GPU waste heat.
- OneDeuxTriSeiGo 9mo agoThe distinction is that what they are doing for Webb is trying to dissipate small amounts of heat that would warm up sensors past cryogenic temperatures. Like on the order of tens or hundreds of watts but -100C. Dissipating heat for an AI datacenter is a different game. A single AI inference or training rack is going to be putting out somewhere around 100kW of waste heat. Temps don't have to be cryogenic but it's the difference between chiselling a marble or jade statue and excavating a quarry.
- fnord77 9mo agogot it - thanks
- elihu 9mo agoThat's not a new problem that no one has dealt with before. The ISS for instance has its External Active Thermal Control System (EACTS). It's not so much a matter of whether it's an unsolvable problem but more like, how expensive is it to solve this problem, what are its limitations, and does the project still makes economic sense once you factor all that in?
- Rover222 9mo agoYou really can't grasp that GPUs scaled at this level is the most ambitious thing possible? That it will be the foundation of unfathomable technological innovation?
- qotgalaxy 9mo ago[dead]
- afavour 9mo agoWill it, though?
- kergonath 9mo ago"In space" is the new blockchain.
- SketchySeaBeast 9mo agoEvery time I hear stuff like this I think of Tim Curry just barely keeping it together during that one cut scene in Red Alert 3, except this time it's the ultra capitalists trying to corrupt space with capitalism. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1Sq1Nr58hM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1Sq1Nr58hM
- Rover222 9mo ago"corrupt space with capitalism" I think this is how the masses feel at this point. Progress bad. Capitalism inherently bad. Anything non-natural, bad.
- elihu 9mo agoHonestly, there's not a lot else I can think of if your goal is find some practical and profitable way to take advantage of relatively cheap access to near-Earth space. Communication is a big one, but Starlink is already doing that. One of the things space has going for it is abundant cheap energy in the form of solar power. What can you do with megawatts of power in space though? What would you do with it? People have thought about beaming it back to Earth, but you'd take a big efficiency hit. AI training needs lots of power, and it's not latency sensitive. That makes it a good candidate for space-based compute. I'm willing to believe it's the best low-hanging fruit at the moment. You don't need any major technological advances to build a proof-of-concept. Whether it's possible for this to work well enough that it's actually cheaper than an equivalent terrestrial datacenter now or in the near future is something I can't answer.
- adventured 9mo agoBezos has been pushing manufacturing-in-space for a long time, as a ideal candidate for what to do in space that you might prefer to not do on Earth. Robotics, AI automation, manufacturing - combo it in space, let the robots manufacture for us in space. Abundant energy, low concerns about most forms of pollution. We'll need to dramatically improve our ability to transit mass to and from cheaply first of course (we're obviously talking many decades into the future).
- ehnto 9mo agoThat is a fun thought experiment, as we wouldn't want to manufacture too far away from earth we may still be within the earth's atmosphere. I wonder what effect dumping greenhouse gases into the very upper levels of the atmosphere would have in comparison to doing it lower down. My assumption is it would eventually sink to a lower density layer, having more or less the same impact.
- _fizz_buzz_ 9mo ago> Bezos has been pushing manufacturing-in-space for a long time, as a ideal candidate for what to do in space that you might prefer to not do on Earth. Robotics, AI automation, manufacturing - combo it in space, let the robots manufacture for us in space. LOL, this seems so far off from the reality of what manufacturing looks like in reality. - sending raw materials up there - service technicians are necessary ALL THE TIME, in fully automated production lines - sending stuff back down Maybe I lack vision, but data centers in space is a 1000x times better idea and that is already a terrible idea.
- keepamovin 9mo ago[flagged]
- cagenut 9mo agospacex is one thing but xai accomplished what? the most racist csam prone llm?
- keepamovin 9mo agoI'm not aware of this - What's that?
- queenkjuul 9mo agoProbably shouldn't speak to the brilliance of xAI engineers when you've never heard of their work
- keepamovin 9mo agoIs whatever that is their work?
- queenkjuul 9mo agoNot just that, it's their one and only product, to my knowledge
- keepamovin 9mo agoWell, an LLM is a mirror, right? Maybe you were just using it wrong? Can you give any examples of what you used it for that led you to believe it's what you said? I don't think your view is based on personal experience, but you get my, point, yes? The feeling I get about you here is you simply dislike his companies and Musk and am enjoying seeing him get what he deserves, right? Which I think is the personal mirror of the "state feeling" behind the current official actions. More broadly, your comments and many others like it in these threads, identify a narrow band of content with the product as a whole. And the implication being if you disagree with hatred against Musk / xAI, you must be a pervert. Which is intended as a reputational threat to intimidate people into not voicing support. But if an LLM is used to create bad content by some, does that mean the only content it can create is bad? Does that mean that every user is using it to create bad content? If xAI has a problem with bad content, they need better controls. I don't think these state efforts nor discourse are about the bad content. I think that issue is just a vector through which to assert pressure. I think it's because people in power want control over something that is, annoyingly to them, resisting control. And not in a way that's about "bad content", but in a way that's about inconvenient-to-them content.
- computerthings 9mo ago[dead]
- nwellinghoff 9mo agoYeah it does not make a whole lot of sense as the useful lifespan of the gpus in 4-6 years. Sooo what happens when you need to upgrade or repair?
- Lalabadie 9mo agoThis is a question that analysts don't even ask on earnings calls for companies with lowly earthbound datacenters full of the same GPUs. The stock moves based on the same promise that's already unchecked without this new "in space" suffix: We'll build datacenters using money we don't have yet, fill them with GPUs we haven't secured or even sourced, power them with infrastructure that can't be built in the promised time, and profit on their inference time over an ever-increasing (on paper) lifespan.
- acchow 9mo ago> This is a question that analysts don't even ask On the contrary, data centers continue to pop up deploying thousands of GPUs specifically because the numbers work out. The H100 launched at $30k GPU and rented for $2.50/hr. It's been 3 years since launch, the rent price is still around $2.50. During these 3 years, it has brought in $65k in revenue.
- hdjrudni 9mo agoThey can run these things at 100% utilization for 3 years straight? And not burn them out? That's impressive.
- imtringued 9mo agoI don't see anything impressive here?
- vlovich123 9mo agoNot really. GPUs are stateless so your bounded lifetime regardless of how much you use them is the lifetime of the shitties capacitor on there (essentially). Modulo a design defect or manufacturing defect, I’d expect a usable lifetime of at least 10 years, well beyond the manufacturer’s desire to support the drivers for it (ie the sw should “fail” first).
- Aeolun 9mo agoBut everyone is crazy about GPU’s right now. Why not ride that wave for extra investment? All the benefits transfer to all the other things we can do with it.
- overfeed 9mo ago> But being able to pull if off implies an ability to do a lot more interesting things. Those interesting things won't pump up the perceived value of Musk companies to stratospheric levels - or dare I say - to the moon. He needs the public to believe that to earn the trillion-dollar package from the Tesla-Twitter-SpaceX conglomerate, even if the latter turns out to be the only profitable arm of the conglomerate.
- thrtythreeforty 9mo ago"TwitslaX"
- somenameforme 9mo agoA lot of great inventions we now take for granted initially came with little motivation other than being able to kill each other more effectively. GPS, radar, jet engines, drones, super glue, microwaves, canned food, computers, even the internet. Contrary to the narrative of the internet being about sharing science, ARPANET was pushed by the DoD as a means of maintaining comms during nuclear war. It was then adopted by universities and research labs and started along the trajectory most are more familiar with. The tale of computers is even more absurd. The first programmable, electric, and general-purpose digital computer was ENIAC. [1] It was built to... calculate artillery firing tables. I expect in the future that the idea of putting a bunch of solar into space to run GPUs for LLMs will probably seem, at the minimum - quaint, but that doesn't mean the story ends there. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC
- Peaches4Rent 9mo agoYes, but as Ron Perlman famously said in the beginning of Fallout, "War never changes". I would be more shocked that we eliminated war than if we achieved this version of Elon's future. It makes sense to think that we will continue to make scientific progress through war and self defense. Reason being, nothing is more motivating than wanting to survive
- somenameforme 9mo agoNot to go heads I win, tails you lose, but even if we go down this path - it's the same story because militaries are investing heavily in LLM stuff, both overtly and covertly. Outside of its obvious uses in modeling, data management, and other such things - there also seems to be a fairly widespread belief, among the powers that be, that if you just say the magic words to somebody, that you can make them believe anything. So hyper-scaling LLM potential has direct military application, same as Starlink and Starship.
- nurumaik 9mo agoI think it's much simpler: smart mass surveillance. With LLMs you can finally read and analyze all messages people send to each other
- infinitewars 9mo agoThe data centers in space is 100% about Golden Dome, https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_system) https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_syst...
- vaxman 9mo agoNope, it's 100% about building the stock valuation of SpaceX for an IPO in the face of significant risk from a cold war its CEO started on X with the U.S. federal government and increasing competition from Blue Origin, Quinfan and Guowang. DOD will play Bedrock vs Grok until there is feature parity and then make a decision not based on the features. Disclaimer: Not an Elon hater, but far from a sycophant, similar to how I felt about Steve Jobs for 40+ years.
- hunta2097 9mo agoExactly, this is about attaching the AI hype bubble to all of his dealings before he offloads with an IPO (that still leaves him with 75% of the stock).
- infinitewars 9mo agoWhat do you mean by Nope? Do you understand what Golden Dome is about?
- vaxman 9mo agoI even understand what Brilliant Pebbles was about.
- bigyabai 9mo agoAh, back to this again.
- SideburnsOfDoom 9mo agoWe also shouldn't overlook the benefits we might realize if humanity achieved the incredible engineering and technical capacity necessary to make this version of porcine flight happen. IDK, what about the side-benefits of applying the "incredible engineering and technical capacity" to something useful instead? Rather than finding rationalisations for space spambots.
- raverbashing 9mo agoAnd that's why the best way to use Superman's powers is in making him turn a giant crank (yes I fully agree with you!)
- spacecadet 9mo ago"The problem is that this is both wildly overambitious and somehow incredibly myopic at the same time." Im sorry, but this is literally every single figurehead in society today.
- pplonski86 9mo agoDo we need rockets to put satelittes to the space? Cant it be done with baloons? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFieAD5Gpms https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFieAD5Gpms
- MPSimmons 9mo agoBalloons work by displacing the atmosphere (mostly nitrogen with some oxygen) with something lighter (helium or hydrogen). This causes buoyancy, and makes the balloon rise. This only works so long as the atmosphere being displaced weighs more than the balloon plus the payload. As soon as the air gets thin enough that the weight of the balloon+payload is equal to the weight of the air that would fill the volume of the balloon, then it stops rising. (Or, more likely the balloon rips open because it expanded farther than it could stretch). Usually, this is really high in the atmosphere, but it's definitely not space. This is all ignoring that orbit requires going sideways really, really fast (so fast, actually, that it requires falling, but going sideways so fast that the earth curves away and you miss).
- gilbetron 9mo ago"Space" aka Orbit, is done not by going high, but by going fast.
- jimbokun 9mo agoReed Richards is Useless https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ReedRichardsIsUseless https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ReedRichardsIsUs...
- saalweachter 9mo agoI feel like the proposal also glosses over why a merger is necessary and desirable to accomplish the goals. Why couldn't xAI just, you know, contract with SpaceX to launch its future Datacenters In Space? Wouldn't a company focused on a single mission, Datacenters In Space, be better at seeing that goal to fruition, instead of a Space Launch Company with a submission of Datacenters In Space, which might decide to drop the project in three years to focus on their core mission of being a Space Launch Company? Even granting the goal as desirable and possible, why is a merger the best way to pull it off?
- franktankbank 9mo agoProbably because its just a shitty justification to move money around.
- LeFantome 9mo agoI am no Elon fan but the biggest obstacle to AI is definitely power and then cooling. Space solves both. Hard to argue with the basic idea here.
- invig 9mo agoYour argument is that Elon isn't grandiose enough with his statements and timelines?