[rainsford]

We also shouldn't overlook the fact that the proposal entirely glosses over the implication of the alternative benefits we might realize if humanity achieved the incredible engineering and technical capacity necessary to make this version of space AI happen.

Think about it. Elon conjures up a vision of the future where we've managed to increase our solar cell manufacturing capacity by two whole orders of magnitude and have the space launch capability for all of it along with tons and tons of other stuff and the best he comes up with is...GPUs in orbit?

This is essentially the superhero gadget technology problem, where comic books and movies gloss over the the civilization changing implications of some technology the hero invents to punch bad guys harder. Don't get me wrong, the idea of orbiting data centers is kind of cool if we can pull it off. But being able to pull if off implies an ability to do a lot more interesting things. The problem is that this is both wildly overambitious and somehow incredibly myopic at the same time.

[somenameforme]

A lot of great inventions we now take for granted initially came with little motivation other than being able to kill each other more effectively. GPS, radar, jet engines, drones, super glue, microwaves, canned food, computers, even the internet. Contrary to the narrative of the internet being about sharing science, ARPANET was pushed by the DoD as a means of maintaining comms during nuclear war. It was then adopted by universities and research labs and started along the trajectory most are more familiar with.

The tale of computers is even more absurd. The first programmable, electric, and general-purpose digital computer was ENIAC. [1] It was built to... calculate artillery firing tables. I expect in the future that the idea of putting a bunch of solar into space to run GPUs for LLMs will probably seem, at the minimum - quaint, but that doesn't mean the story ends there.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC

[WD-42]

That’s not the point of the person you are replying to. They are saying if we somehow come up with the tech that makes harnessing the sun a thing, the best we can still do is put a bunch of GPUs in space? It makes no sense.

[saratogacx]

I think the Colossus[1] predated the ENIAC but is still in line with your general theme of doing stuff for the military. In this case it was used for cipher breaking, not firing calculations.

You could argue that it doesn't really count though because it was only turing complete in theory: "A Colossus computer was thus not a fully Turing complete machine. However, University of San Francisco professor Benjamin Wells has shown that if all ten Colossus machines made were rearranged in a specific cluster, then the entire set of computers could have simulated a universal Turing machine, and thus be Turing complete."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer

[vidarh]

Yes, but isn't that pretty much the point of the person you replied to? We know that a lot of inventions were motivated by that, and so it is incredibly myopic to not pause and try to think through the likely far broader implications.

[andrepd]

Well computers are a funny story. The groundwork had been laid and the theoretical and engineering advances that would produce programmable digital computers were well underway in the 1930s. It would have happened very soon even if there was no war, but of course WWII happened right in 1939, so obviously computers made at that time had the purpose of calculating artillery paths or decrypting German messages. But it would be incorrect to say that military applications in WWII are the reason computers were invented.

[Peaches4Rent]

Yes, but as Ron Perlman famously said in the beginning of Fallout, "War never changes".

I would be more shocked that we eliminated war than if we achieved this version of Elon's future.

It makes sense to think that we will continue to make scientific progress through war and self defense.

Reason being, nothing is more motivating than wanting to survive

[WalterBright]

The digital internet began with the telegraphy network in the early 1800s.

Many, many network protocols were developed and used.

[bydlocoder]

The only purely military thing is rockets and everything space related, there's just no way private businesses would've poured so much money into it

Computers and internet being storage, processing and communication systems are clearly useful for civilian purposes

[throw0101a]

> Contrary to the narrative of the internet being about sharing science, ARPANET was pushed by the DoD as a means of maintaining comms during nuclear war.

[citation needed]

Because according to Bob Taylor, who initially got the funding for what became ARPANET:

> Taylor had been the young director of the office within the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency overseeing computer research, and he was the one who had started theARPANET . The project had embodied the most peaceful intentions—to link computers at scientific laboratories across the country so that researchers might share computer resources. Taylor knew theARPANET and its progeny, the Internet, had nothing to do with supporting or surviving war—never did.Yet he felt fairly alone in carrying that knowledge.

> Lately, the mainstream press had picked up the grim myth of a nuclear survival scenario and had presented it as an established truth. When* Time magazine committed the error, Taylor wrote a letter to the editor, but the magazine didn’t print it. The effort to set the record straight was like chasing the wind; Taylor was beginning to feel like a crank.

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/281818.Where_Wizards_Sta... § Prologue

> Taylor told the ARPA director he needed to discuss funding for a networking experiment he had in mind. Herzfeld had talked about networking with Taylor a bit already, so the idea wasn’t new to him. He had also visited Taylor’s office, where he witnessed the annoying exercise of logging on to three different computers. And a few years earlier he had even fallen under the spell of Licklider himself when he attended Lick’s lectures on interactive computing.

> Taylor gave his boss a quick briefing: IPTO contractors, most of whom were at research universities, were beginning to request more and more computer resources. Every principal investigator, it seemed, wanted his own computer. Not only was there an obvious duplication of effort across the research community, but it was getting damned expensive. Computers weren’t small and they weren’t cheap. Why not try tying them all together? By building a system of electronic links between machines, researchers doing similar work in different parts of the country could share resources and results more easily. […]

* Wizards § Chapter 1

The first four IMPs were UCLA, SRI, UCSB, and Utah. Then BBN, MIT, RAND, System Development Corp., and Harvard. Next Lincoln Laboratory and Stanford, and by the end of 1970 Carnegie-Mellon University and Case Western Reserve University.

It was only "later in the 1970s" that command and control was considered more (Lukasik):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET#Debate_about_design_go...

But the first two people who get the project going, Taylor and Herzfeld, were about the efficient use of expensive computer resources for research. Look at the firs >dozen sites and they were about linking researchers: the first DoD site wasn't connected until 3-4 years after things go going, and there was nothing classified about it. MILNET didn't occur until 1984:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET#Operation

[overfeed]

> But being able to pull if off implies an ability to do a lot more interesting things.

Those interesting things won't pump up the perceived value of Musk companies to stratospheric levels - or dare I say - to the moon. He needs the public to believe that to earn the trillion-dollar package from the Tesla-Twitter-SpaceX conglomerate, even if the latter turns out to be the only profitable arm of the conglomerate.

[thrtythreeforty]

"TwitslaX"

[nwellinghoff]

Yeah it does not make a whole lot of sense as the useful lifespan of the gpus in 4-6 years. Sooo what happens when you need to upgrade or repair?

[Lalabadie]

This is a question that analysts don't even ask on earnings calls for companies with lowly earthbound datacenters full of the same GPUs.

The stock moves based on the same promise that's already unchecked without this new "in space" suffix:

We'll build datacenters using money we don't have yet, fill them with GPUs we haven't secured or even sourced, power them with infrastructure that can't be built in the promised time, and profit on their inference time over an ever-increasing (on paper) lifespan.

[mandeepj]

> the useful lifespan of the gpus in 4-6 years. Sooo what happens when you need to upgrade or repair?

Average life of starlink satellite is around 4-5 years

[superbaconman]

With zero energy cost it will run until it stops working or runs out of fuel, which I'm guessing is between 5-7 years.

[pantalaimon]

Same that happens with Starlink satellites that are obsolete or exhausted their fuel - they burn up in the atmosphere.

[tgsovlerkhgsel]

> Sooo what happens when you need to upgrade or repair?

The satellite deorbits and you launch the next one.

[gricardo99]

not to mention that radiation hardening of chips has a big impact on cost and performance

[rlt]

A "fully and rapidly reusable" Starship would bring the cost of launch down orders of magnitude, perhaps to a level where it makes sense to send up satellites to repair/refuel other satellites.

[esseph]

This is such a hypebeast paragraph.

Datacenters in space are a TERRIBLE idea.

Figure out how to get rid of the waste heat and get back to me.

[elihu]

That's not a new problem that no one has dealt with before. The ISS for instance has its External Active Thermal Control System (EACTS).

It's not so much a matter of whether it's an unsolvable problem but more like, how expensive is it to solve this problem, what are its limitations, and does the project still makes economic sense once you factor all that in?

[typ]

It makes sense to target a higher operating temperature, like 375K. At some point, the energy budget would reach an equilibrium. The Earth constantly absorbs solar energy and also dissipates the heat only by radiative cooling. But the equilibrium temperature of the Earth is still kind of cool.

I guess the trick lies in the operating temperature and the geometry of the satellites.

[fnord77]

I agree that data centers in space is nuts.

But I think there's solutions to the waste heat issue

https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/goddard/engineer...

[jonners00]

Heat exchanger melts salts, salts boil off? Some kind of potential in there to use evaporants for attitude/altitude correction. Spitballing. Once your use case also has a business case, scope to innovate grows.

[everfrustrated]

Just have to size radiators correctly. Not a physics problem. Just an economic one.

Main physics problem is actually that the math works better at higher GPU temps for efficiency reasons and that might have reliability trade off.

[byearthithatius]

So what are the other things? You said he glossed over them and didn't mention a single one.

[aorloff]

Reliably and efficiently transport energy generated in space back to earth, for starters

Or let me guess, its going to be profitable to mine crypto in space (thereby solving the problem of transporting the "work" back to earth)

[SergeAx]

If we (as in "civilization") were able to produce that many solar panels, we should cover all the deserts with them. It will also shift the local climate balance towards a more habitable ecosystem, enabling first vegetation and then slowly growing the rest of the food chain.

[saalweachter]

I feel like the proposal also glosses over why a merger is necessary and desirable to accomplish the goals.

Why couldn't xAI just, you know, contract with SpaceX to launch its future Datacenters In Space?

Wouldn't a company focused on a single mission, Datacenters In Space, be better at seeing that goal to fruition, instead of a Space Launch Company with a submission of Datacenters In Space, which might decide to drop the project in three years to focus on their core mission of being a Space Launch Company?

Even granting the goal as desirable and possible, why is a merger the best way to pull it off?

[franktankbank]

Probably because its just a shitty justification to move money around.

[raverbashing]

And that's why the best way to use Superman's powers is in making him turn a giant crank

(yes I fully agree with you!)

[Rover222]

You really can't grasp that GPUs scaled at this level is the most ambitious thing possible? That it will be the foundation of unfathomable technological innovation?

[kergonath]

"In space" is the new blockchain.

[afavour]

Will it, though?

[MPSimmons]

> the most ambitious thing possible

really?

[Aeolun]

But everyone is crazy about GPU’s right now. Why not ride that wave for extra investment? All the benefits transfer to all the other things we can do with it.

[SideburnsOfDoom]

We also shouldn't overlook the benefits we might realize if humanity achieved the incredible engineering and technical capacity necessary to make this version of porcine flight happen.

IDK, what about the side-benefits of applying the "incredible engineering and technical capacity" to something useful instead? Rather than finding rationalisations for space spambots.

[jimbokun]

Reed Richards is Useless

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ReedRichardsIsUs...

[invig]

Your argument is that Elon isn't grandiose enough with his statements and timelines?

[pplonski86]

Do we need rockets to put satelittes to the space? Cant it be done with baloons? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFieAD5Gpms

[MPSimmons]

Balloons work by displacing the atmosphere (mostly nitrogen with some oxygen) with something lighter (helium or hydrogen). This causes buoyancy, and makes the balloon rise.

This only works so long as the atmosphere being displaced weighs more than the balloon plus the payload. As soon as the air gets thin enough that the weight of the balloon+payload is equal to the weight of the air that would fill the volume of the balloon, then it stops rising. (Or, more likely the balloon rips open because it expanded farther than it could stretch).

Usually, this is really high in the atmosphere, but it's definitely not space.

This is all ignoring that orbit requires going sideways really, really fast (so fast, actually, that it requires falling, but going sideways so fast that the earth curves away and you miss).

[gilbetron]

"Space" aka Orbit, is done not by going high, but by going fast.

[LeFantome]

I am no Elon fan but the biggest obstacle to AI is definitely power and then cooling. Space solves both.

Hard to argue with the basic idea here.

[Cipater]

How does space solve cooling?

It's much more difficult to cool things in space than on earth.

[elihu]

Honestly, there's not a lot else I can think of if your goal is find some practical and profitable way to take advantage of relatively cheap access to near-Earth space. Communication is a big one, but Starlink is already doing that.

One of the things space has going for it is abundant cheap energy in the form of solar power. What can you do with megawatts of power in space though? What would you do with it? People have thought about beaming it back to Earth, but you'd take a big efficiency hit.

AI training needs lots of power, and it's not latency sensitive. That makes it a good candidate for space-based compute.

I'm willing to believe it's the best low-hanging fruit at the moment. You don't need any major technological advances to build a proof-of-concept. Whether it's possible for this to work well enough that it's actually cheaper than an equivalent terrestrial datacenter now or in the near future is something I can't answer.

[p1esk]

You don't need any major technological advances to build a proof-of-concept

You do - cooling those datacenters in space is an unsolved problem.

[adventured]

Bezos has been pushing manufacturing-in-space for a long time, as a ideal candidate for what to do in space that you might prefer to not do on Earth. Robotics, AI automation, manufacturing - combo it in space, let the robots manufacture for us in space. Abundant energy, low concerns about most forms of pollution. We'll need to dramatically improve our ability to transit mass to and from cheaply first of course (we're obviously talking many decades into the future).

[spacecadet]

"The problem is that this is both wildly overambitious and somehow incredibly myopic at the same time."

Im sorry, but this is literally every single figurehead in society today.

[raegis]

I once had a job mopping floors and was quite successful at it, even if I say so myself. Based on my experience, do you think it is reasonable for me to claim that I will eventually develop techniques for cleaning the oceans of all plastic waste? Folks are criticizing the pie in the sky claims, not that they can do anything at all.

[MSFT_Edging]

What have the engineers at XAI accomplished? From the ground level, it seems they followed the same research all the other LLM chatbot companies did. They followed along and made a sassy mecha hitler who makes revenge porn.

XAI isn't a serious venture.

[adventured]

There's no reason to think the brilliant minds at SpaceX are supportive of focusing their mission in any manner-what-so-ever on datacenters in space. You can't call on their genius as the supportive argument accordingly.

[cagenut]

spacex is one thing but xai accomplished what? the most racist csam prone llm?

[danmaz74]

This vision doesn't come from those great engineers, but from Elon, the guy who promised Hyperloop, FSD in 2 years 10 years ago, and lots of other BS

[buzzin__]

When a cultist hits you with their side of, ahm, facts, it invariably ends up being some kind of a logical fallacy. Is there a name for this phenomenon?

In this case it is the "how we dare not trusting all the experts at spaceX."

But even the fallacy itself is applied incorrectly, as we hear zero from anyone else other than the cult leader himself.

[sixQuarks]

This place has derangement syndrome unfortunately. Such pessimists, it’s a bit sad

[infinitewars]

The data centers in space is 100% about Golden Dome,

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_syst...

[vaxman]

Nope, it's 100% about building the stock valuation of SpaceX for an IPO in the face of significant risk from a cold war its CEO started on X with the U.S. federal government and increasing competition from Blue Origin, Quinfan and Guowang. DOD will play Bedrock vs Grok until there is feature parity and then make a decision not based on the features.

Disclaimer: Not an Elon hater, but far from a sycophant, similar to how I felt about Steve Jobs for 40+ years.

[bigyabai]

Ah, back to this again.