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> Geopolitical concerns, infrastructure/power availability, security, since these things are full of incredibly valuable hardware. The market decides that, not
by zarzavat 5mo ago
> Geopolitical concerns, infrastructure/power availability, security, since these things are full of incredibly valuable hardware.
The market decides that, not Elon. Do customers want to pay $X for compute in Iceland (or wherever), or do they want to pay $kX for compute in space?
What premium are customers willing to pay for compute in space? I would guess that the premium is actually negative because the quality of computation in space is worse than under the sweet embrace of Earth's atmosphere which provides a natural protection against radiation.
- ericd 5mo agoNo premium, it's just a question of whether people can and are willing to build enough in those other places. Space is a bet that they can't. Also, I don't think bitflips are a huge deal in space for neural nets, we already build in randomness via temperature. A little more shouldn't make things noticeably worse. Higher energy particles could be a problem over time, but when I looked into it, it looked like the incidence of very damaging particles for a given area was surprisingly low.