In a blog post, Musk said the acquisition was warranted because global electricity demand for AI cannot be met with “terrestrial solutions,” and Silicon Valley will soon need to build data centers in space to power its AI ambitions.
This dumb fuck. Unfortunately, his boosters will be all-in on this messaging. Whatever.
Someone needed a distraction from his name appearing all over the Epstein files
Every article needs to read “Elon Musk, who’s name repeatedly appeared in the Epstein files”
Financial trickery is what this is. Rolling one failing business into the next, Tesla will follow soon. It’s incredible that this is even legal, but of course nothing matters anymore in Trump’s America.
The stupid thing is that it‘s perfectly legal as long as nobody looks into it and because it‘s a US corporation nobody will look into it.
“…creating the worlds most overvalued private company.”
FTFY.
I’m not really convinced SpaceX was over valued IF Starship succeeds, but every single part of xAi was.
And also, that’s a pretty big if!
For sure. I don’t doubt they’ll get it functional and getting payloads to space, but the entire premise is on full rapid reuseability, including same day relaunch of starship. That is still a very very very big if.
If they can’t get to that point, it’s not worth anywhere near what it is being predicted to be worth.
You mean that guy who desperately tried to invite himself to an island to rape kids, but was deemed too big of a weirdo and jackass?
Yeah cool, go AI rockets or whatever.
I guess do feel bad for the innovators and engineers that are doing actual cool shit in his companies. Must suck to be downstream of that shithead. So much potential, so much stigma (for the company, not the pedo fuckhead)
Spacex had a team of people who would cosplay as engineers and be enough of a distraction that it would distract him from meddling with anything really important. He’s mostly whittled away the leadership that protected the company from him these days
We NEED Datacenters in SPACE so we can Make Better CHILD PORN with GROK!
The government will not let SpaceX fail, it’s a strategic asset and Musk knows this. He is going to tie his Xai to it and saddle it with all the debt it is incurring. When the AI bubble pops he will be able to ask for bail outs to keep SpaceX afloat.
Companies that are too big to fail and need a bail out, should be automatically nationalised.
“B-b-but that will stifle innovation!”
It will most certainly stifle innovative ways to leech more profit while the taxpayer is left holding the bag.
Ah, who am I kidding? They’ll find something new. It will just spark more innovation.
*Automatically nationalized and leadership at those companies should be investigated and tried for fraud.
These CEOs need to take accountability not a golden parachute. They know when a business is failing and when they are defrauding investors and the public.
Ding ding ding!
That the reason behind all the AI datacenters in space hubub? Makes sense. The usual “subsidize the losses” strategy.
I could have seen the opposite, too, where xAI pays spaceX gobs of money for tons of datacenter launches in advance, bubble pops, xAI goes under and spaceX still has the money. But ya I think this is “the govt won’t let spaceX fail, pile all the riskiest shit into that”
Putting AI datacenters in space has got to the be dumbest idea conceived by Elon yet. There has to be several dozen engineering challenges to even make that happen and when all is said and done it would make absolutely no financial sense to actually do it. This is just yet another attempt by Elon to hype up spacex for an IPO. It’s a very poor attempt at that.
it’s getting hard to differentiate his ideas that are intentionally scams and his ideas that are just ketamine fueled insanity
You would have really liked the comedian we saw last night. Epstein files were the main topic. Sammy Obeid. Good stuff.
Isn’t heat management like one of the stickiest problems in long term space travel? Bc a vacuum doesn’t have anything it can transfer heat to so it can’t cool down. And this guy wants to establish data centers for which heat management is also its biggest problem.
Heat dissipation was my very first thought. Musk’s whole premise is absolute horseshit with modern and even near-future tech.
It’s not a problem like “get heavy thing off ground”, where we can study principles of lift, throw fossil fuels at rocketry, etc. There is no magic bullet for “move this massive amount of heat somewhere else”; entropy has too much to say on the subject.
Space is the worst place for high powered servers because of all the heat involved along with the inability to perform maintenance. It’s just a grift, it will not be profitable to put HPC GPUs in orbit.
Please reboot the server, on site.
That’s what the AI (Actual Indians) controlled robots will be for
I know someone who should try that in the company who try it without a space suite.
hopefully his shitty AI will tank his nazi rockets. one can only hope.
It kind of sucks because the people working at spaceX are actually doing great things as a whole.
Just sucks a person like muskrat is the face of it.
They should work for NASA instead.
NASA has contracted out basically all their rockets. We need spacex. Elon needs to be in jail. If only for threatening national security with this dumb move. Never mind being a Nazi and election interference.
Republicans keep gutting the NASA budget.
Yes, go work for the shithead nazi government instead of the shithead nazi private company…
Pretty sure NASA is not run by Nazis, are you good?
HA!
You should look into where the Nazi rocket scientists went after WW2 and how few of them saw any form of punishment for their involvement.
And that doesn’t even take into account the pseudo-Nazis running the current US government, which is certainly what the other poster was talking about.
Nazis and NASA are like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
This is, at least, a better written take
Oh, so NASA os not qctually a government agency? Neat…when did they separate out from the government, I must have missed that
The people at SpaceX are poisoning landscapes that used to be neighborhoods with toxic waste because the company doesn‘t give a shit about the environment, people or the planet. Fuck whoever works at SpaceX and partakes in this. Oh, they‘re also making Musk even more powerful so that‘s a double L.
I’m gonna need a source for that. I follow SpaceX fairly closely (as a fan of the engineering, not Musk), and I can’t think of where this could possibly be happening, even through a wild misunderstanding of a situation.
Agreed. I just got banned from techtakes for pointing this out but the Falcon 9 rocket is the most reliable launch vehicle today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_orbital_launch_systems
So he decided to ruin his one successful company. Which is successful because he wasn’t involved in running it until now.
Can we also take a moment to acknowledge how utterly unhinged this part is?
“This marks not just the next chapter, but the next book in SpaceX and xAI’s mission: scaling to make a sentient sun to understand the Universe and extend the light of consciousness to the stars!”
yeah wtf… a sentient sun? First of all, how do we know the sun isn’t sentient? And if it was/is why assume it would give a shit about humanity?
But also wtf… Like, he’s trying to merge the sun with AI? Am I taking it too literally? He’s trying to create god? So he can ask for forgiveness for being a pedo pos?
It’s a bunch of technobabble loosely related to his harebrained scheme to launch a fuckload of solar powered AI servers into LEO.
Okay, so I am taking it too literally because he’s not even trying to be accurate with the description. What a weirdo.
He probably used AI to generate a mission statement for the merged company.
“Sentience” is like this hand-waving magic word. Defined typically as the ability to experience sensations and feelings, it’s very anthropic and egocentric.
We know that life evolved on Earth, to include our own species. We know that much life on Earth has an internal sense for pain and pleasure, as well as many instinctual drives like self-preservation. We know that our species knows things, and we know that other species don’t have the same depth in their capacity to know things. We’ve demonstrated that other species don’t seem to understand the world in the same way as us humans. Yet, we’ve never quite figured out what any other species knows. We’ve never modeled their form of sentience, let alone our own. We only really know about sentience intuitively, via our own experience. We judge everything’s capacity as though it’s either less than, equal to, or greater than our own — without consideration for how something might just be different. Not higher or lower, but parallel in a way.
I don’t know what sun sentience would be like, not any more than I already know why any sentience is like (beside my own), but I can say one thing for sure. Our own sentience is heavily influenced by bias: social, political, legal, economical, financial, emotional, religious, moral, and scientific bias. Peel back those layers of bias, what’s left? Sun sentience might be something like that, like a blank slate that just exists.
Big tangent, but I just want to say I love this reply, and it’s a great example of what reddit has lost and lemmy has preserved.
Speaking of other species and knowledge, whale songs IMO are something like the dialup sound we used to hear when our internet went over the land line. Apparently they can hear each other from an ocean away as well. Whales may have entire religions for all we know. It’s fascinating to think about, and they’re right here on this planet with us; the Sun only knows what else is out there.
Any sort of universal god would not care about the daily life of bacteria on a piece of dust in an unimaginably larger system.
Exactly.
Though, if life is truly rare, they may value us for that reason, but there’s no reason to believe they’d improve anything for us.
Yeah it’s a coin toss whether they would want to check us out further, or use the galactic form of chlorine on the area.
But odds are they would neither specifically know nor care. In likelihood I imagine there is other life, and not all based on carbon and water. There could be life on gas giants, even on suns, based on completely different chemical interactions.
I also think about this a lot. For all we know the storm on Jupiter could be thinking.
Even humble life on it’s moons, living with ammonia in it’s blood or something, as they found on titan. Lakes of methane, with methane rain replete with lightning. Volcanic eruptions of water mixed with ammonia that kept it from freezing and had it in a semi solid molten state at -200 degrees f or whatever it is. From the probe landed there, forget when that was, on titan. But life could exist even there, even if not higher life, they do have liquid bodies. That is the factor for life, the right liquid to gas temperature changes with the right chemical reactions, and the spar of zeus.
I disagree completely, and I am not a believer in any god. You care about things as a human, but (should a god exist) don’t you think it a step too far to assume a gods experience would be anything at all like our own? Whether it cares or doesn’t may be the wrong question entirely — too anthropic of a question. Even if it did have the human sense of care in its faculty of psychology, something that may entirely be a social construct, then wouldn’t it equally so be arrogant to assume what a creator does/not care about? A creator might care a lot about you, and sees suffering as some kind of tough love… who the hell can say? The universe could be infinite, and that could simply be a preference in design. Who the hell can say?
God isn’t our enemy, whether or not it exists. Our enemy is the people who claim to speak for god.
What I’m trying to say is I believe in the utterly indifferent god. It likely neither knows nor cares about us. We would go to church about it, but what’s the point?
We do not have all the answers, and we should accept that, from our position on this speck of dust in the unimaginably larger system we live amongst, we should just embrace that we don’t know everything, despite the experts telling us affirmatively the age and size of the universe as if they could know, or the religious leaders espousing ideas the age of reason has proven to be wrong.
Part of wisdom is accepting what you don’t, and what you can’t know.
I don’t really disagree with much of what your responded with however. Creator is a nebulous term. Creating biological machines that evolve to meet their conditions become rather removed from those creators if separated by unimaginable large distances between solar systems. There is no way any being seeding life would survive to watching it evolve over billions of years, even if some form of transport could break the speed of light, which I believe to be impossible.
Dude, that’s talos principle. You aren’t clever.
They didn’t say that did they? Jesus, yeah, that’s what they are doing, not playing the biggest confidence scam in the world.
Space solar panels and datacenters is pure fraud. Merger is purely to ruin one established company with revenue, mostly government funded, with an anchor to sink it, but help mecha hitler control skynet.
I used to think space data centers was a scam, but I learned how much power existing satellites already use (and thus must be able to radiate into space to keep cold), and just looking at the ISS, each radiator (and it has several) can reject 14 kW into space, so if the ISS has can safely generate 14 kW of electricity and reject all the waste heat, then the major concern for me is addressed. Space datacenters are the first step to industry, in space, which is an necessary step for a lot of future stuff.
All the above is beyond the point though, he’s playing shell games to tie his most valuable and critical company, SpaceX, to the trashheap of AI bullshit so that the government will bail him out when it crashes.
But data centers use tens to hundreds of megawatts. So we’re talking about thousands or tens of thousands of times the heat.
That was my stumbling block, too. Don’t think of it as taking a datacenter and putting it into space whole, think of it as taking 5 or 10 racks and putting that into space, and repeating till you have as much compute as a datacenter. So it’s basically the size of a schoolbus (same size as hubble telescope) and it has solar panels+ heat rejection like those of the ISS, and then bolt a starlink on the end, and you can put as many of those in orbit as you need.
Each part of the hardware is doable(ish), and if the nerds who actually run datacenters say the terrestrial energy/cooling cost numbers vs launch cost numbers make sense, I’m inclined to believe them even if I don’t get to see that math specifically. But right now it’s just AI bros saying the costs make sense, and I don’t as much believe them.
You’re right, but I don’t mind if he sends his stuff to outer space
What advantage does space provide at all?
You have to transport heavy great into a place with no cooling capacity… What?
No advantage, in fact a massive disadvantage.
Fascists lie.
mainly no red tape trying to connect to a power grid, plus “free” solar power.
We have “free” solar here on Earth.
No cooling capacity? Isn’t it the extreme opposite?
No, it’s pretty hard to get rid of heat in space, vacuum is a very good insulator. The only way is radiation.
Thanks
No, space isn’t cold it’s empty. You need something to conduct away the heat, otherwise all you can do is passively radiate it
Fascinating. Will look more into it to understand.
I think Scott Manly might have had a video on it (data enter in space) recently. I saw it on a feed but haven’t watched it. I’m sure he would mention the issues with heat removal.
TLDW: cooling’s fine if you use starlink V2 size and power (which is not very suitable for AI ‘datacentre’ use) because it works already.
This is not about a few huge datacentres, it’s about a million small ones. There’s 99 problems with this (see Kessler syndrome !, radiation, …), cooling isn’t (much of) one.
Doesn’t matter anyway, it just has to be vaguely plausible for a stock IPO pump (and dump) scheme while sweeping all that xAI debt under the rug.
https://youtu.be/d-YcVLq98Ew&t=8m24s
Doesn’t say why a vacuum cannot conduct heat though, but it makes sense to me now anyhow. Heat is vibrating molecules so to mitigate the vibration you need adjacent molecules which aren’t vibrating as much.
Read the traveller sourcebooks, they especially for the ship designs. Good stuff
Welcome to middle school physics.
Don’t be a dick. Not everyone remembers everything they did in middle school.
Hide the company losing money in the company making money. He has done this before.
And I’m sure this has nothing to do with grok on X creating CA.
Doesn’t this have the potential to backfire in light of things like the lawsuits in France? Before just xAI would have been liable, but now isn’t SpaceX is also liable for generative AI CP?
Datacenters on the bottom of the sea are useless because of the difficulties of hardware maintenance and the snake oil salesman is trying to sell out space datacenters now.
Salt water is a bitch.
The point of these being in space is there is no maintenance.
Like they aren’t doing maintenance on any starlink satellite.
