It's widely reported that Musk is a majority shareholder of xAI and the controlling shareholder of SpaceX (close to 80% of voting shares). Not surprising that he would be looking to consolidate ownership under one entity especially if he perceives significant synergies (i.e., data centres in space).
Shocked to see SpaceX buy the datacenter in space meme. Where does the power come from? Where does the heat go? Why add (high) launch costs to your buildout capex? Why add radiation as another risk factor to your already-unreliable GPUs? Am I missing something fundamental here...?
Money! Also power source is just solar - not too difficult. I don't think radiation would be too much of an issue either since they're in low earth orbit. Heat is probably the biggest problem. Or manufacturing & launch costs. Pretty silly idea anyway.
Aside from Elon Musk, there are a few other people with a lot of capital aiming to do the same thing. That means, either they are all wrong (possible) or this problem has been solved somehow and the solution itself is not public.
Google and Amazon are doing the same thing. Maybe it is a moonshot (pun intended), but Musk is hardly alone in the push.
Not to mention the huge issues of cosmic rays. Sure, if the lifespan of the satellite is expected to be low, then maybe tolerable. But even then, how would this be financially viable?
I think it's far more likely that he wants to combine his businesses to roll his really expensive, debt-ridden companies into one entity with the company that actually reliably makes money.
Indeed. But it's also a hilariously Musky idea! Some moderate technical competence paired with sociopathy and an ego orders of magnitude too big, and voila, you get Cybertrucks, Hyperloops, Neuralinks, Teslabots, datacenters in space, and all the other garbage the man spews.
I cannot wait for him to one day be hit in the face by reality.
I have never understood how Data centers in space ever make economic sense, the payload, latency and many other issues make it difficult at least for the immediate needs
DCs in space have a lot of problems, but latency isn't really one of them. At least for inference*, I don't care if a chat response comes with a 0.2 second ping time (Earth-GEO-Earth at the speed of light), and I definitely don't care if a vibe coding session has a 2.5 second ping time (Earth-Moon-Earth).
I wonder what the largest viable ping time would be, for vibe coding? If it exceeds 40 minutes (my pre-Christmas experimentation would have been fine with that but it was just experiments), these things could be on Mars on the opposite side of the sun and still be useful.
* I have no idea what training needs, neither fundamentally nor currently in practice
given the max bandwidth of a starlink sat is in the 100Gb on a good day range why would you want to limit a DC to less bandwidth than a single cheap fibre?
Also in LEO you're going to have reentry become more of an issue (starlink burning up in the atmosphere isn't some free garbage removal it will have a measurable impact on the chemical make up (assuming it even burns up and doesn't just squash more farm buildings), Power supply more of an issue and still have huge problems with heat and radiation.
I could not disagree more - often times, especially if travelling with multiple people it is far more convenient, comfortable and can even be more affordable than taking public transport. While I agree that London has great public transport, Uber has been a game changer for myself and many people I know.
Lived here all my life, no idea what you mean, it's always been great, and even when it was run-down it was still better than nearly all other cities at the time.
Thats the problem. You never experienced anywhere better. I mean they only recently got an underground that operates past midnight. Barcelona has had that for years, its way cheaper than London, and no one here seems to think it is anything special.
Well—aside from the fact that London's public transport was pretty good ten years ago—it's not the same, no. There have been substantial improvements in the past 10 years, including the expansion of the Overground service, new rolling stock all over the place, capacity improvements, some 24-hour running at weekends, clawback of TfL Rail, system-wide contactless card support, improved bus services, the imminent arrival of Crossrail…
I took the list of 4 thousand odd cities from the UN statistics report of cities over 100k and then ran it through the batch geocoding site: http://www.findlatitudeandlongitude.com/ ... apart from that just old fashioned excel to calculate
How I built this: I pulled the population data from the UN statistics report on cities over 100k and then batch geocoded all of the cities (there was also a fair bit of data cleansing required). I then used a macro in excel to calculate the distance between every city pair (using Vincenty's formula) and uploaded the results to a database. Happy to share more if anyone is curious.
