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Anthropic needs any compute they can get. So if Elon wants to build orbital data centers Anthropic would be happy to run models on it. There isn't really any do

by Sevii 5mo ago

Anthropic needs any compute they can get. So if Elon wants to build orbital data centers Anthropic would be happy to run models on it. There isn't really any doubt Elon can build orbital data centers the question is if they are economical compared to earth based.

deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
cyclopeanutopia 5mo ago
What are you talking about There is no doubt that it's not a serious idea.
- charlieflowers 5mo ago
  Help me understand why not? I know solar power generation in space, and "beaming" the power back, was a naive idea. But this would actually use the power up there, mostly for training, but also for inference. That claim seems reasonable. I have zero knowledge of the economics of launching and maintaining satellites though.
  - PufPufPuf 5mo ago
    As I understand it, the problem is cooling. There isn't any medium to take away the heat, so the only option is to slowly radiate it away.
    - Sammi 5mo ago
      Anyone who has googled just once to ask if datacenters in space make any sense, has found out they don't because they can't get rid of heat. That leaves only two kinds of people left who are still talking excitedly about datacenters in space: The uninformed and the grifters.
      - redox99 5mo ago
        The area you need in radiators is only half the area you need in solar panels. So it's definitely not a deal breaker. Its still very dumb because of economics, logistics, serviceability and more.
        scottyah 5mo ago
        Pretty much everything has been "very dumb because of economics, logistics, serviceability and more". What kind of hacker are you to be on this site lol
        prepend 5mo ago
        Solar on earth was dumb because of logistics, right? Things get cheaper.
        redox99 5mo ago
        Long term maybe, but I don't think it makes sense now, and won't for many years.
        prepend 5mo ago
        What’s cool is that we’ll see.
      - dzhiurgis 5mo ago
        Scott Manley, I’d say one of the top pop space youtubers say otherwise. If anything it’s easier in space. On earth most complexity in datacenter is cooling. In space you just radiate it away. And SpaceX already proven they can launch sort of datacenters 10k times by launching Starlink (up to 20KW of solar each IIRC). FWIW Musk should support Bernie Sanders more. Putting moratoriums on datacenters would make space based ones far more economical.
        mcmcmc 5mo ago
        “YouTuber” is an extremely poor qualification for a supposedly trusted source
    - Gagarin1917 5mo ago
      Which is apparently manageable. Scott Manley isn’t an industry veteran, but he does know a lot about space engineering and science. Here’s his breakdown of the feasibility, and heat management is not really a major issue: https://youtu.be/DCto6UkBJoI https://youtu.be/DCto6UkBJoI
      - throwaway85825 5mo ago
        Heat management is not a technical issue but a reliability issue.
        londons_explore 5mo ago
        These satellites will be in orbits where they are always illuminated. That means constant temperatures, which means no thermal cycling and no reliability concerns. When people say 'running it hot is bad for reliability', they mean 'running it hot and then brining it back to room temp from time to time will eventually kill it'.
        throwaway85825 5mo ago
        It's in space which requires liquid cooling. No rocket is big enough so it has to be assembled on orbit. No liquid cooling terrestrial system is 100% leak free.
  - super256 5mo ago
    In space you get bit flips fairly quickly when using very small transistors. You would have to run stuff on fairly old hardware, which probably makes the whole thing economically inefficient for serious "computation in space".
  - runako 5mo ago
    Cost. The economics don't work unless Starship is doing flights in quantity, and it has met or exceeded its cost targets. Roughly, a single rack plus solar to power it in the $15m+ range just to launch. (This assumes power dissipation is handled via some means that does not require launch to orbit. Also does not include batteries.) Choose your own hardware for the rack, but call it < $5m. SpaceX earning $15m every time someone launches a $5m rack would be a great business for SpaceX. Use your own calculator/LLM, but mine is suggesting that the ~$7B Colossus 1 data center in TFA would be around $50B if launched on Falcon 9 (still ignoring cooling and batteries). (There are obviously a lot of other asterisks. I'm ignoring power storage and heat dissipation. Maintenance probably doesn't matter given 75% of cost is in the launch. Network bandwidth could be a problem considering how DCs are used. Competition - if Company A spends $100B for $25B of actual AI infra, how competitive will they be against Company B who gets $100B for their $100B by spending it in Canada or Mexico, which they can do right now? Etc.) None of this works without Starship, which has not set a date for its first LEO insertion test yet. Yet the whole point of orbital DCs is nothing on the ground can move fast enough, hence the rush to orbit...which can't really move at all right now. No, it doesn't make any sense.
- signatoremo 5mo ago
  [flagged]
23rf 5mo ago
I love how this line of thinking completely avoids the issue re. improvements in local models. I suppose if you are desperate to justify a large investment this what you would do - frame the story in a particular way.
- impulser_ 5mo ago
  Local models are always going to be useless unless compute get significantly cheaper, and it's not. TSMC might literally run out of capacity to build any consumer compute product. Once computer constraints ease up, you will see much larger models. The reason LLM seems to have stalled a bit is because there just not enough compute. You have more people using AI which requires more compute, and you want to build larger models which requires more compute and you have limited compute. What do you do?
  - 23rf 5mo ago
    Right.. and computers were once the size of a large room vs now fit into a pocket. " The reason LLM seems to have stalled a bit is because there just not enough compute." lol okay mate.
    - s08148692 5mo ago
      > Right.. and computers were once the size of a large room vs now fit into a pocket. and yet now we have far bigger rooms with far bigger computers anyway Hardware may improve exponentially, but demand for compute increases double-exponentially. we'll always need more, bigger computers
    - impulser_ 5mo ago
      https://x.ai/news/anthropic-compute-partnership https://x.ai/news/anthropic-compute-partnership There is literally not enough compute dude. If we had infinite compute we would see everyone building Mythos size models. "Right.. and computers were once the size of a large room vs now fit into a pocket." Yeah because we offload much of the compute to off device. You think we would have these small computers in our pockets if the internet didn't exist?

by Sevii 5mo ago

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

cyclopeanutopia 5mo ago

What are you talking about There is no doubt that it's not a serious idea.

charlieflowers 5mo ago
Help me understand why not? I know solar power generation in space, and "beaming" the power back, was a naive idea. But this would actually use the power up there, mostly for training, but also for inference. That claim seems reasonable. I have zero knowledge of the economics of launching and maintaining satellites though.
- PufPufPuf 5mo ago
  As I understand it, the problem is cooling. There isn't any medium to take away the heat, so the only option is to slowly radiate it away.
  - Sammi 5mo ago
    Anyone who has googled just once to ask if datacenters in space make any sense, has found out they don't because they can't get rid of heat. That leaves only two kinds of people left who are still talking excitedly about datacenters in space: The uninformed and the grifters.
    - redox99 5mo ago
      The area you need in radiators is only half the area you need in solar panels. So it's definitely not a deal breaker. Its still very dumb because of economics, logistics, serviceability and more.
      - scottyah 5mo ago
        Pretty much everything has been "very dumb because of economics, logistics, serviceability and more". What kind of hacker are you to be on this site lol
      - prepend 5mo ago
        Solar on earth was dumb because of logistics, right? Things get cheaper.
        redox99 5mo ago
        Long term maybe, but I don't think it makes sense now, and won't for many years.
        prepend 5mo ago
        What’s cool is that we’ll see.
    - dzhiurgis 5mo ago
      Scott Manley, I’d say one of the top pop space youtubers say otherwise. If anything it’s easier in space. On earth most complexity in datacenter is cooling. In space you just radiate it away. And SpaceX already proven they can launch sort of datacenters 10k times by launching Starlink (up to 20KW of solar each IIRC). FWIW Musk should support Bernie Sanders more. Putting moratoriums on datacenters would make space based ones far more economical.
      - mcmcmc 5mo ago
        “YouTuber” is an extremely poor qualification for a supposedly trusted source
  - Gagarin1917 5mo ago
    Which is apparently manageable. Scott Manley isn’t an industry veteran, but he does know a lot about space engineering and science. Here’s his breakdown of the feasibility, and heat management is not really a major issue: https://youtu.be/DCto6UkBJoI https://youtu.be/DCto6UkBJoI
    - throwaway85825 5mo ago
      Heat management is not a technical issue but a reliability issue.
      - londons_explore 5mo ago
        These satellites will be in orbits where they are always illuminated. That means constant temperatures, which means no thermal cycling and no reliability concerns. When people say 'running it hot is bad for reliability', they mean 'running it hot and then brining it back to room temp from time to time will eventually kill it'.
        throwaway85825 5mo ago
        It's in space which requires liquid cooling. No rocket is big enough so it has to be assembled on orbit. No liquid cooling terrestrial system is 100% leak free.
- super256 5mo ago
  In space you get bit flips fairly quickly when using very small transistors. You would have to run stuff on fairly old hardware, which probably makes the whole thing economically inefficient for serious "computation in space".
- runako 5mo ago
  Cost. The economics don't work unless Starship is doing flights in quantity, and it has met or exceeded its cost targets. Roughly, a single rack plus solar to power it in the $15m+ range just to launch. (This assumes power dissipation is handled via some means that does not require launch to orbit. Also does not include batteries.) Choose your own hardware for the rack, but call it < $5m. SpaceX earning $15m every time someone launches a $5m rack would be a great business for SpaceX. Use your own calculator/LLM, but mine is suggesting that the ~$7B Colossus 1 data center in TFA would be around $50B if launched on Falcon 9 (still ignoring cooling and batteries). (There are obviously a lot of other asterisks. I'm ignoring power storage and heat dissipation. Maintenance probably doesn't matter given 75% of cost is in the launch. Network bandwidth could be a problem considering how DCs are used. Competition - if Company A spends $100B for $25B of actual AI infra, how competitive will they be against Company B who gets $100B for their $100B by spending it in Canada or Mexico, which they can do right now? Etc.) None of this works without Starship, which has not set a date for its first LEO insertion test yet. Yet the whole point of orbital DCs is nothing on the ground can move fast enough, hence the rush to orbit...which can't really move at all right now. No, it doesn't make any sense.
signatoremo 5mo ago
[flagged]

23rf 5mo ago

I love how this line of thinking completely avoids the issue re. improvements in local models. I suppose if you are desperate to justify a large investment this what you would do - frame the story in a particular way.

impulser_ 5mo ago
Local models are always going to be useless unless compute get significantly cheaper, and it's not. TSMC might literally run out of capacity to build any consumer compute product. Once computer constraints ease up, you will see much larger models. The reason LLM seems to have stalled a bit is because there just not enough compute. You have more people using AI which requires more compute, and you want to build larger models which requires more compute and you have limited compute. What do you do?
- 23rf 5mo ago
  Right.. and computers were once the size of a large room vs now fit into a pocket. " The reason LLM seems to have stalled a bit is because there just not enough compute." lol okay mate.
  - s08148692 5mo ago
    > Right.. and computers were once the size of a large room vs now fit into a pocket. and yet now we have far bigger rooms with far bigger computers anyway Hardware may improve exponentially, but demand for compute increases double-exponentially. we'll always need more, bigger computers
  - impulser_ 5mo ago
    https://x.ai/news/anthropic-compute-partnership https://x.ai/news/anthropic-compute-partnership There is literally not enough compute dude. If we had infinite compute we would see everyone building Mythos size models. "Right.. and computers were once the size of a large room vs now fit into a pocket." Yeah because we offload much of the compute to off device. You think we would have these small computers in our pockets if the internet didn't exist?