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Very possible Elon is doing this to make give Anthropic better chances against OAI while he attempts to reshape xAI. Also possible he sees infra as the future
by urams 5mo ago
Very possible Elon is doing this to make give Anthropic better chances against OAI while he attempts to reshape xAI.
Also possible he sees infra as the future of xAI if he really believes in the value of space compute.
Hard to see this any of this as anything other than a bearish sign for Grok though.
- jameson 5mo agoRight, also Anthropic has been having difficult time getting more GPUs
- fillskills 5mo agoWe could see the first company vertically integrated from etching to chip to data center
- jacobrast 5mo agoWhat do you mean by etching? Google does also it's own chip design with TPUs, data centers, and models but afaik only TSMC Intel and Samsung do the actual semiconductor fabrication
- ericd 5mo agoAssume he's referring to SpaceX's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terafab https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terafab
- oblio 5mo ago> Analysts estimate the costs for the full-scale facility at between US$5−13 trillion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Line,_Saudi_Arabia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Line,_Saudi_Arabia Musk and MBS should hold hands.
- gpm 5mo agoTurning The Line into one giant ~~paperclip~~ chip assembly line! We can call it the Peta(Principle)Line!
- SadErn 5mo ago[dead]
- AlotOfReading 5mo agoThat's Intel. Probably IBM too, though they've been doing mass manufacturing with TSMC (and GloFo before) for years instead of their fabs. I wouldn't be surprised if HP did similar things back in the 80s.
- Glohrischi 5mo agoWe wont for anytime soon. Intel and TSMC are not what they are today just because they buy a very expensive EUV Machine from ASML but because they have the knowledge and infrastructure to even use these machines.
- sofixa 5mo agoIBM was doing this since the 50s.
- tristanj 5mo agoThat's very doubtful given recent news that Colossus is running at 11% capacity and has hundreds of thousands of idle GPUs. xAI acquired too many GPUs and currently doesn't have enough customers to use them. That's why they are making compute deals with Anthropic and Cursor. xAI is bleeding money and this compute deal with Anthropic will pay for all of xAI's capex ($25 billion) in 2 years.
- shenberg 5mo ago11% MFU does not mean 89% of GPUs are idle, it means that they're using the GPUs ineffectively.
- jbs789 5mo agoThe post you’re referring to doesn’t even include “89%” or “idle”. I’m not sure I understand the point you’re making then rebutting.
- SecretDreams 5mo agoThis might actually be worse from a power costs standpoint.
- reliabilityguy 5mo ago11% capacity is not 11% MFU. The first is about actually using the hardware for something in the first place, the latter is about how efficiently you compute. Different things.
- skywhopper 5mo agoHe believes in the value of the idea of “space compute” for attracting investors to SpaceX. But the existence of the idea of “space compute” as a better way to deploy datacenters (along with everything else Musk has claimed in the past decade) should give everyone pause as to the plausibility of literally everything else he says.
- oblio 5mo ago> should give everyone pause as to the plausibility of literally everything else he says. That ship has sailed, we're in the Age of Cults. If you're a believer you're probably also invested in his companies, so your mind is doubly-clouded.
- geodel 5mo ago> so your mind is doubly-clouded Further I think external agents are controlling their mind.
- pyrale 5mo ago> He believes in [...] ...the value of having others buy the idea of space computing. I don't think he himself believes in what he says.
- jpadkins 5mo ago> along with everything else Musk has claimed in the past decade * mass produced EVs * Neural links to brain * reusable rockets * more efficient tunnel digging Dude has a pretty good record of taking stuff in R&D and making pretty real products and/or companies. Can you name someone better?
- ctoa 5mo agoMass produced EVs and reusable rockets are already decade old accomplishments. His track record this last decade of accomplishing things he proposes is noticeably much worse. Neuralink is just another medical device company right now. The things it is succeeding at aren't the crazy sci-fi Elon "telepathy" vision at all, and there are other BCI companies. Boring Company is quite stagnant and I would say what they achieved is very underwhelming. The original framing was that it would revolutionize the costs of subway and high speed rail tunnels and it has not achieved that at all. The things it currently does are nothing like the vision Musk was selling in 2017, much of the original concept was shelved. Robotaxi is wildly off schedule and his timelines that he puts out for it have been non-stop over optimistic and wrong. This may catch up eventually, but it's currently not at the point that Musk was already claiming it was at 10 years ago. I'd list as another big flop of the last 10 years the Tesla Solar Roof. Also, I think by far the biggest Musk reality mismatch is the story he pushes regarding Optimus vs what anyone has actually seen of that product. That mismatch is absolutely wild. Anyone who believes the things he says about timelines for it needs to get a grip.
- Glohrischi 5mo agoThat would be absolutly ludicris. His own product is competing against anthropic.
- cbm-vic-20 5mo agoIt's a money maker. Maybe not a number one spot, but they don't have to stand up any more datacenters.
- Glohrischi 5mo agoHis product should be the money maker.
- jrflo 5mo agoSpace compute isn't real though, it's just a scheme to pump the value of SpaceX before IPO by associating it with AI. It's really hard to cool things in space, because there's no matter to transfer the heat away. All you've got is radiative cooling, and that's really really slow.
- utopiah 5mo ago> space compute Heard anybody remotely competent about space talk the topic? It's pretty much a literal laugh every time.
- sebmellen 5mo agoWhile I agree with you on the merit of the idea, rockets that can take off and then land vertically without damage were also laughable pre-SpaceX.
- altcognito 5mo agoNASA had literally done it. It was never laughable, just thought to be an incredibly difficult engineering challenge. I think compute in space suffers less from being "impossible" and more from being "impractical". It is plenty easy to put compute in space. It is just still silly expensive and by the time your equipment makes up the cost of putting it in space, it will be well out of date.
- selectodude 5mo agoThe non-deterministic nature of LLMs will get a whole lot more fun when we add randomly flipping bits to the situation.
- Forgeties79 5mo agoIt is absolutely baffling to me how frequently I hear people talk about this around me. There is no way this is happening anytime in the near future.
- notfromhere 5mo agoxAI is a dead company; you don't sell compute if you're growing. More promising is that cursor is training a model using it.
- giancarlostoro 5mo agoI think its a mix of both of your first two points. He has hinted that he will be producing chips for Tesla and SpaceX here in the US in the future, so there will be a time where Elon will have every critical component we need for Tesla and SpaceX here in the US and not overseas, and fully in-house. Once he does this, nothing stops him from selling components. He's also insanely efficient at standing up data centers, so I would not be surprised if he gets enlisted by someone like Anthropic to setup infrastructure for him.
- mitjam 5mo agoInteresting that nobody mentioned SAR in this thread, yet. SAR benefits from space compute by reducing the strain on downlinks (pre-process, detect in space). A large-ish (think 6k sat) constellation of much bigger sats (2-2,5 ton) than current Starlink sats can run inference on board, distribute load to nearby sats, and enable full round-the-clock surveillance of the whole world. The nominal compute capacity is in ballpark range of a modern AI data center, but it's only about 20% used on average due to duty cycles. An indestructible, global eye. The big Starship launch vehicle is perfect platform to bring them into orbit, can maybe bring 40 at a time into orbit, so 150 launches for 6k. Maybe even fewer sats are needed, depends mostly on electrical efficiency of the components.