110 ms·

> space compute Heard anybody remotely competent about space talk the topic? It's pretty much a literal laugh every time.

by utopiah 5mo ago

sebmellen 5mo ago
While 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 ago
  NASA 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is just still silly expensive and by the time your equipment makes up the cost of putting it in space, it will be well out of date.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 ago
    The non-deterministic nature of LLMs will get a whole lot more fun when we add randomly flipping bits to the situation.
Forgeties79 5mo ago
It 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.
- tuveson 5mo ago
  But if the US isn’t the first to put an AI on the moon, we’ll lose the AI space race!
  - paddy_m 5mo ago
    Mr. President, we must not allow a mine-shaft gap!
    - Forgeties79 5mo ago
      To this day still my favorite line in the movie. It really just punctuates the whole thing
- __MatrixMan__ 5mo ago
  You don't have to actually have an orbiting datacenter for the idea to work. You just have to convince enough people. Once you've done that, you can claim that regional regulations don't apply to your data because the data is in orbit. Its not like somebody is gonna go up there and catch you in the lie. Out-of-regulatory-reach is what they'll actually be selling. It can be on earth, it just has to be sufficiently hidden such that you can claim that it's in space.
  - estearum 5mo ago
    I don't think that's the purpose and if it is, it's obviously trivially solvable. The US can and does simply assert jurisdiction all over the globe. There's no reason it can't or wouldn't extend that to orbit. That conversation goes like this: US: Stop doing that thing with your data center X: It's in space, you can't tell us what to do US: Yes we can X: <Say OK> or <Go to jail>
    - deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
  - everfrustrated 5mo ago
    The US already claims jurisdiction on all launches from US and NZ (Rocket Lab). Every one of these had to get approval from the US to launch.
wongarsu 5mo ago
Some of the proposals are laughable, some of the example calculations are. The idea of running AI training sounds extremely challenging. But the idea of inference in space doesn't seem absurd The power budget of a starlink v2 mini satellite is estimated at around 20kW based on the known solar panel size. That also matches what a satellite of that size would roughly dissipate without dedicated radiators, using just some heat pipes to spread the heat evenly over the satellite's surface. There is nothing fundamentally preventing you from taking the same satellite design, remove most of the comms payload and instead put 15kW of GPUs there. Or about 10 GB200 including the CPUs, networking, etc that you need along with the GPUs Now, do the economics work out for $300k worth of compute for each satellite, in an environment where maintenance is impossible and degradation will be higher than on the ground? Probably not right now, but in a couple years they might
- ashley95 5mo ago
  How is this not absurd? What is the benefit? Space is a harsh environment, with issues due to solar radiation etc, etc. And it's permanently 100ms away from any user.
- sulam 5mo ago
  Tl;dr — but it’s too heavy You’re making some decent points here, but you’re either forgetting or ignoring the major thing that people usually neglect to mention when they want to make a case for this (crazy) idea — weight. Unless SpaceX is going to completely redesign hardware such that it is optimized entirely for its mass, it requires many (many) launches to even get a small set of racks into space. I don’t normally get up in arms about the CO2 emissions of data centers, I think there is offsetting value created by their use, but I would absolutely protest trying to put data centers in space and do my best to shut down the hundreds, if not thousands of launches it would take to achieve even a tiny fraction of an AI data center.
  - jpadkins 5mo ago
    Have you calculated the CO2 output of Terran datacenters run on natural gas vs. space datacenters run on solar? The launch CO2 usage is one time, the datacenter energy is for the life of the equipment.

> space compute Heard anybody remotely competent about space talk the topic? It's pretty much a literal laugh every time.

by 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 ago

While 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 ago
NASA 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 ago
  The non-deterministic nature of LLMs will get a whole lot more fun when we add randomly flipping bits to the situation.

Forgeties79 5mo ago

It 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.

tuveson 5mo ago
But if the US isn’t the first to put an AI on the moon, we’ll lose the AI space race!
- paddy_m 5mo ago
  Mr. President, we must not allow a mine-shaft gap!
  - Forgeties79 5mo ago
    To this day still my favorite line in the movie. It really just punctuates the whole thing
__MatrixMan__ 5mo ago
You don't have to actually have an orbiting datacenter for the idea to work. You just have to convince enough people. Once you've done that, you can claim that regional regulations don't apply to your data because the data is in orbit. Its not like somebody is gonna go up there and catch you in the lie. Out-of-regulatory-reach is what they'll actually be selling. It can be on earth, it just has to be sufficiently hidden such that you can claim that it's in space.
- estearum 5mo ago
  I don't think that's the purpose and if it is, it's obviously trivially solvable. The US can and does simply assert jurisdiction all over the globe. There's no reason it can't or wouldn't extend that to orbit. That conversation goes like this: US: Stop doing that thing with your data center X: It's in space, you can't tell us what to do US: Yes we can X: <Say OK> or <Go to jail>
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
- everfrustrated 5mo ago
  The US already claims jurisdiction on all launches from US and NZ (Rocket Lab). Every one of these had to get approval from the US to launch.

wongarsu 5mo ago

Some of the proposals are laughable, some of the example calculations are. The idea of running AI training sounds extremely challenging. But the idea of inference in space doesn't seem absurd The power budget of a starlink v2 mini satellite is estimated at around 20kW based on the known solar panel size. That also matches what a satellite of that size would roughly dissipate without dedicated radiators, using just some heat pipes to spread the heat evenly over the satellite's surface. There is nothing fundamentally preventing you from taking the same satellite design, remove most of the comms payload and instead put 15kW of GPUs there. Or about 10 GB200 including the CPUs, networking, etc that you need along with the GPUs Now, do the economics work out for $300k worth of compute for each satellite, in an environment where maintenance is impossible and degradation will be higher than on the ground? Probably not right now, but in a couple years they might

ashley95 5mo ago
How is this not absurd? What is the benefit? Space is a harsh environment, with issues due to solar radiation etc, etc. And it's permanently 100ms away from any user.
sulam 5mo ago
Tl;dr — but it’s too heavy You’re making some decent points here, but you’re either forgetting or ignoring the major thing that people usually neglect to mention when they want to make a case for this (crazy) idea — weight. Unless SpaceX is going to completely redesign hardware such that it is optimized entirely for its mass, it requires many (many) launches to even get a small set of racks into space. I don’t normally get up in arms about the CO2 emissions of data centers, I think there is offsetting value created by their use, but I would absolutely protest trying to put data centers in space and do my best to shut down the hundreds, if not thousands of launches it would take to achieve even a tiny fraction of an AI data center.
- jpadkins 5mo ago
  Have you calculated the CO2 output of Terran datacenters run on natural gas vs. space datacenters run on solar? The launch CO2 usage is one time, the datacenter energy is for the life of the equipment.