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Can any provider survive without ads? These AI firms are propped up by VC money, they need to create profits at some point and ads is the most surefire way to d
by cabernal 8mo ago
Can any provider survive without ads? These AI firms are propped up by VC money, they need to create profits at some point and ads is the most surefire way to do this
- pgt 8mo agoYes, xAI & Anthropic. Electricity generation is the constraining factor, but the sun does not turn off in space. xAI data centers in space drives cost to zero, even with inferior models. I see no other future than SpaceXai winning.
- logicx24 8mo agoHow will we handle cooling in space?
- pgt 8mo agoBoyle’s Law: run at higher temperature. Watch Elon’s interviews. He is right.
- notrealyme123 8mo agoThis sounds like Air conditioning in space. But watching him battling basic physics is very funny, not gonna lie.
- lm28469 8mo ago> Watch Elon’s interviews. He is right. 90% of his predictions didn't materialize, he's full of shit, how do people keep falling for it over and over again?
- pgt 8mo agoWhich ones didn’t materialize?
- lm28469 8mo agoFully autonomous cars in 2014, 2015, 2016, ... 2026 Camera based fully self driving cars Robotaxi fleets by 2020 Whatever the fuck were these tesla tunnels in LA Humans on Mars by 2024 The sub 25k tesla etc.
- Rodeoclash 8mo agoHyperloop
- ponector 8mo agoI'm still waiting for full self-driving car autopilot to materialize.
- JohnnyMarcone 8mo agoI was going to say that you're parroting his interviews and then you outted yourself.
- LeoPanthera 8mo agoYou are going to be utterly shocked when you realize that solar panels work on the ground, too. You can buy so many batteries, and so many geographically separated locations for your panels, for the price of launching a datacenter into space.
- pgt 8mo agoBatteries are expensive. Marginal cost of launches keep coming down for SpaceX with reusable rockets and lifetime of satellites is long.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- pgt 8mo agoSolar panels are much more efficient in space (no atmosphere). Before downvoting, would you mind quoting the relative cost of batteries vs. solar panels for a 150kW solar-powered satellite?
- notrealyme123 8mo agoWith or without the rocket?
- lm28469 8mo agoThey lose 0.5% efficiency for every 1c above 25c, do you plan on having your space panels actively cooled? FYI you'd need 2x the solar panels of the ISS to run a single rack of NVIDIA GB300, and microsoft just built a datacenter with 4600 of these racks.
- philistine 8mo agoNever forget cooling. People imagine a square box with a ginormous sea of solar panels attached, and forget the atrocious and horrible cooling required to vent all the heat that makes your home sewage line look like bottled water by comparison.
- AlexandrB 8mo agoFor the price of launching a datacenter into space, you could probably build one in NA, one in Europe, and one in Asia and solve the "sun sets" problem that way with the side benefit of having excess capacity you can turn on by paying for local non-solar electricity.
- vitaflo 8mo agoYou also have easy upgradeability and expansion, easier cooling and the value of the land and hardware as an asset. None of which are available in space.
- margalabargala 8mo agoCost to zero? Definitely not. Solar in space produces 30% more power, and doesn't turn off at night, meaning you don't need batteries. That means power costs, say, 25% of what it currently does measured against terrestrial solar and batteries. The 75% electricity discount needs to pay for launch vehicles, specially designed satellites, and the inability to service the hardware or resell it when it's EOL for the data center. It's a gamble. Maybe it'll turn out to be a slight edge, maybe it'll turn out to fail, but it's not a sure thing and it certainly isn't going to hugely decrease the cost. Especially since they're competing against Google and their custom designed hardware that's far more power efficient for AI. It's not clear that NVIDIA running at a 75% dollar discount beats Google's best TPU in compute per dollar.
- pgt 8mo agoThe constraint is getting regulatory approval for building new power plants on Earth, even solar plants. We can make chips faster than we can build power plants.
- margalabargala 8mo agoThat's a constraint. It's not the constraint. There are far too many variables still unknown to all parties. Anyone trying to say with certainty "X will lose", whether X is terrestrial or space based DCs, is lying and probably trying to sell you something.
- freetanga 8mo agoLame. I was expecting Elmo to crack cold fusion in a ketamine-infused weekend and solve power constraints for the world. Guess he is not as bright as he thinks he is.
- Moomoomoo309 8mo agoTime is a factor here. You need to launch each of these into space. Now, in the time it took to send those satellites up into space, how many datacenters and how many solar panels and how many GPUs could you have set up and built and had operational? If latency isn't a factor, why bother building them in the US? Build them in Iceland where they have cheap geothermal! The amount of rockets you'd need to launch to fit the same number of GPUs as a datacenter is definitely quite a few. SpaceX has done 165 flights in 2025. How many datacenters or solar farms or battery plants can you build in the time it'd take to launch 1 datacenter worth of satellites? I'm entirely ignoring the problem of cooling in space (which is a huge problem!), and of how much it'd cost to launch the satellites.
- unleaded 8mo agoasking £200/month for the high tiers isn't enough?
- cabernal 8mo agoto be honest probably not
- oehpr 8mo agoIf that is the case that I can not understand how a few cents extra from ad spots will make the difference.
- wilg 8mo agoAdvertisers will pay MORE per user than users will. That is why they are so valuable to companies offering freemium services!
- oehpr 8mo agoerr... really? Soooo youtube premium costs $13 CAD, You're saying that google would make MORE money off me if I cancelled that, turned off my ad blocker and just watched videos with the ads? For things like LLM the inference cost is higher than it is to deliver a video. What you just said was shocking to me. Absolutely shocking. Where can I find more information?
- syntaxing 8mo agoScale. You can monetize on the people that don’t pay the $200/month. Obviously I have nothing to prove this statement, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the subscriptions are loss leaders.
- wiredpancake 8mo agoSam Altman said they are losing money on their $200/m tier.
- TacticalCoder 8mo ago> Can any provider survive without ads? These AI firms are propped up by VC money ... Google's Gemini is SOTA and Google is valued at 4 trillion. Now it's ironic of course: Google became a 4 trillion thanks to ads. Which now allows Google to serve no ads in Gemini. It doesn't matter to Google that they're operating at a loss with Gemini: they can throw hundreds of billions at the problem over a few years, serving zero ads, while people make fun of the AI firms showing ads, like ChadGPT. OpenAI is not just facing Anthropic and its "no ads" ad, it's also facing "we're a 4 trillion company and can run Gemini at a loss for decades" Google, "we pretend we'll put datacenters in space so that xAI can tap into the SpaceX warchest", openweight models which anybody can run on rented hardware for next to nothing compared to ChadGPT's price, etc. It doesn't matter if others can survive without ads: all that matters is that they can survive long enough without ads so that OpenAI doesn't become another trillion dollar company.