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by tmountain5 hours ago |
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upvoteby embedding-shape5 hours ago|
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But what is xAI? I thought that was the company that had the compute + Grok, the AI company? Since when does SpaceX (which I thought was a space company?) own AI-compute hardware and/or can do model hosting? Are all of Musks companies just one big thing now where the names no longer matter, or how is it supposed to work?

Edit: seems I'm just a bit behind: "xAI — now part of SpaceX ", seems really strange for a space company to buy an AI company, but I guess rather that, than the other way around.

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upvoteby uxhacker5 hours ago|
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I think some justify it as SpaceX plans to offer hosting in space, and then use Starlink to distribute it.
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upvoteby mmcwilliams24 minutes ago|
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Can you provide a good example of something that is currently hosted in space and distributed via satellite?
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upvoteby BLKNSLVR1 hours ago|
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That's what the IPO salesman and pamphlet said anyway.
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upvoteby robmccoll5 hours ago|
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Musk sold Twitter into xAI which he then sold into SpaceX as a financial engineering effort to lessen the impact of massive debts and cash burn. The IPO and some clever structuring is the final step in the process.
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upvoteby bmitc12 minutes ago|
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I.e., fraud.
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upvoteby thisisit5 hours ago|
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Next up Tesla and SpaceX are going to merge and that will another round of synergies where Tesla and Vision AI (in FSD) and xAI.
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upvoteby peterspath5 hours ago|
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Not really strange... if the goal is to go to mars, you probably need robots, those need intelligence -> ai. It fits pretty well, especially because you want to own all the core technologies as a company.
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upvoteby thefounder5 hours ago|
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Wow…sounds like some kindergarten stuff
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upvoteby embedding-shape5 hours ago|
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Why 4-5 companies instead of one then? I thought the goal of SpaceX was to get to Mars, why does xAI need to have that same goal? Or he didn't think xAI was suitable for that goal, then changed his mind so merged the companies?
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upvoteby stuxnet795 hours ago|
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You are overthinking this. The whole purpose of the SpaceX / xAI merger is for Musk to launder his failing companies to make them more palatable to the public. Not unlike the complex Mortgage Backed Securities of the GFC era which had a ton of low quality debt but yet were somehow assigned spotless credit ratings. Twitter is also being rolled up into SpaceX for the same reason.
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upvoteby trollbridge3 hours ago|
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I sure wish my company were failing the same way Musk’s allegedly are.
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upvoteby olyjohn48 minutes ago|
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Yeah, there are too many people happy to sacrifice principles for a buck...
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upvoteby jazzyjackson2 hours ago|
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Personally I can go without owing money to Saudi royals.
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upvoteby jerojero4 hours ago|
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The stated goal is to "go to mars", the real goal is to make money.

He sold his failing but hype business to his soon-to-IPO successful but kinda boring business.

It's a way of laundering the debt and dumping into investors as he pitted different indexes against each other to force his way into one of them, and have people's 401k buy into them. Its a ton of money.

I wouldn't be surprised if Tesla is bought into spaceX in the future.

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upvoteby cityzen5 hours ago|
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He’s a drug addict and sociopath. Also has very thin skin (and hair) so he does stupid shit. Somehow we are all left holding the bag on his BS.
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upvoteby BLKNSLVR1 hours ago|
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And Africa is left holding a larger bag of Ebola.
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upvoteby Rover2224 hours ago|
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It has nothing to do with Grok, at least not the current iteration. SpaceX is the only company that can concievably launch large scale orbital compute.
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upvoteby jazzyjackson2 hours ago|
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I’m out of the loop, why is compute better /after/ being launched into space? Is the idea just to be co-located within the ISP to reduce round trip time to the LLMs?
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upvoteby laughing_man1 hours ago|
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There would be some benefits, assuming you could do it for a reasonable cost. For one, you have effectively uninterruptible power using solar panels in space. And it's free, too, once you have the hardware in place.

And you don't have to deal with any of the site selection stuff you have for terrestrial data centers. No NIMBYs. No politicians trying to extort bribes. No water problems.

In space there are no earthquakes, tornadoes, or floods.

I'm still skeptical. It's hard to believe it costs so much to build a data center on the ground that putting it into orbit is an economically viable alternative.

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upvoteby delecti44 minutes ago|
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Yeah, launch costs alone make it infeasible, and power being "free" exacerbates the cost (gotta get all those panels up there). Cooling is also dramatically harder, plus shielding, and it makes repair/upgrade basically impossible.

I'm not going to assert that large scale space compute will never happen, but I feel confident saying it won't happen this decade or next.

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upvoteby BLKNSLVR1 hours ago|
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Grokipedia would be way better launched into space.
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