If you will tell me precisely what it is that my machine cannot do, then I can always prompt my machine to do just that.
- John von Altman
Articulating “what humans can do, that AI cannot” is a mug’s game. If you specify it well enough, they just paste your text into their /goal prompt box and ralph loop their agent swarm until it produces something too exhausting to distinguish from doing the thing. If you don’t specify it well enough, then you’re just doing human-centric magical thinking to move the goalposts etc etc.
Cute that they were concerned, but they need not have worried - as you can clearly see from any HN comments section on these kinds of articles, everyone long ago wrote down their conclusion (“OpenAI/Anthropic/LLMs are good/bad”) at the bottom of the page, and now all we are doing is shuffling facts, quotes, and arguments around the page above it.
We are very clever to make it look like the conclusion below follows from the arguments above; but we are also careful to never smudge our bottom line, so it will never change.
If someone tells us about their new method for practicing guitar, it is very natural and not at all a toolish behaviour to hand them a guitar and say “go on, play us something”.
In fact it’s actually a very socially agreeable action, as it gives them the opportunity to show off their new skills without them looking like they’re bragging.
Now, if you happen to know for a fact that the guy cannot actually play guitar, then you’re just setting him up to embarrass himself, which is maybe an extreme punishment for the relatively minor crime of spouting some bullshit. I could buy that that is hostile, sure.
For “I want A connected to B and I don’t particularly care how” where A and B are long distances apart, Shapez belt mechanics are nicer than Factorio belt mechanics, but Factorio train mechanics are nicer than Shapez belt mechanics.
For “I want to lay down a lot of belt in this area and I want each piece placed in a certain way” I think Factorio belt mechanics are nicer.
I think the C (?) mechanic in Shapez to manually fix a corner is really neat. I haven't tried the Factorio R-while-dragging mechanic, it might be the same or close enough.
God’s been around for thousands of years and we are still here and flourishing, so obviously God is in some way “aligned”; the same cannot be said for AGI.
edit: Guys, I said “in some way”, not “perfectly”.
Survivorship bias. Ask all the humans that have died in horrific screaming agony, and saw everything they worked for turned to dust how well that was aligned with their interests.
The Book of Job addresses this. Basically, it is God's prerogative to do whatever He wants with us. You don't have to like it, but He is still in charge.
In other words god may or may not be aligned with our interests, and if not you’d better just suck it up. Which is contrary to the argument that was being made regarding evidence for alignment.
1. Evidence from history is that god is kind and aligned with our interests.
2. Clearly palpably that’s not always the case.
3. Ok, but tough shit.
There's that, but also that if God exists, there's not anything we can do about it. About AI, we can. That gives us the responsibility to figure out the right direction.
This little blue marble of Earth is an as-yet undiscovered anti-entropic bug in an otherwise accurately functioning entropy-respectingly beautiful wasteland of a universe.
Yes, the physics are worse, and yes, the economics are worse, but data centers in space have the crucial advantage that they are out of range of the molotov-throwing arm of Joe Public (recently unemployed).
Similarly to Starlink , which was hyped as a low codt alternative for marginalised people/areas and sucked in enormous subsidies to that end.
While being more or less a proof of concept for a military command and control network , thats the same way this should be looked at.Especially with data centers being vulnerable on ground, coupled with the ability to reposition the space based units to be 'closer to the action' as it were.
So bottom line a proof of concept for DARPA funds and eventual inegration into the military command and control nodes.
Starlink didn't get any subsidies. There were reports in summer about them potentially getting 600 Mio (btw the broadband program is 40 billion heavy) and I can't find sources that SpaceX got any program founding yet.
You're correct that "we'll pay you to launch this satellite" isn't a subsidy. But "we'll pay you to develop this satellite launcher, and this cargo capsule, and this crew capsule, with the explicit goal of kickstarting a new launch provider" is.
Things like the EV tax credit also apply, considering Musk has leveraged his Tesla holdings to help SpaceX at times.
And to be clear: this was a very good use of public funds, whatever I think of Musk these days.
Exactly, in retrospect it's easy to confuse with a regular commercial transaction that happens to be with the government. But only because SpaceX was ultimately wildly successful with the Falcon 9/Dragon/Crew Dragon.
If SpaceX failed to deliver a working product after a receiving a bunch of incremental payments for the pre-delivery milestones (deliberately structured to prop up their early R&D), it might have ended up front and center as an example of government "picking winners and losers" gone wrong like how Solyndra was featured at the 2012 RNC.
> But "we'll pay you to develop this satellite launcher, and this cargo capsule, and this crew capsule, with the explicit goal of kickstarting a new launch provider" is.
"$38 billion!", the Post shouts about in the headline, knowing full well that people will take away that every cent was a true, untrammeled, unconditional "subsidy", as opposed to government contracts that came after successfully meeting that early ambitious goal the NASA development contract laid out for SpaceX.
By that logic, every US university with federal funding is being subsidized à la Musk. Every small business that gets an SBA loan—the type of low-interest loan that the Post article highlights—is being subsidized. The NASA program that helped fund Falcon 1 were available to anyone with a promising design, and was contingent on meeting various milestones; to paraphrase the old saying about the early manned space program, no Buck Rogers, no bucks. SpaceX delivered the Buck Rogers.
Regarding Crew Dragon, SpaceX and Boeing each signed contracts as part of the Commercial Crew program for six operational manned missions. After SpaceX fulfilled its six, NASA awarded another contract for eight more (and just purchased a few more). Meanwhile, in addition to Boeing being paid substantially much for its half of the program, the company received a $300 million special, uncontracted payment in 2016 (not disclosed until 2019) to further accelerate development.
The Starliner flight that spectacularly ran into difficulties at ISS in 2024 was a pre-operational manned test mission (SpaceX's equivalent was done in May 2020). In other words, Boeing has not yet begun its six operational missions!
Getting back to the Post article:
>Government contracts to SpaceX from NASA and the Defense Department make up the majority of funds.
Again, this isn't the US government giving sacks full of cash to Musk just because it feels like it. Biden's NASA administrator Bill Nelson quoted a member of the Joint Chiefs as telling him that SpaceX had saved the US government $40 billion for just launching military payloads <https://www.fool.com/investing/2022/06/05/did-spacex-really-...>.
> By that logic, every US university with federal funding is being subsidized à la Musk.
That is correct.
> Every small business that gets an SBA loan—the type of low-interest loan that the Post article highlights—is being subsidized.
Yes.
> Meanwhile, in addition to Boeing being paid substantially much for its half of the program, the company received a $300 million special, uncontracted payment in 2016 (not disclosed until 2019) to further accelerate development.
"Boeing is subsidized" is not a controversial statement.
> On the civilian side, SpaceX saved NASA $2 billion for just one payload
Yes, this is why we do subsidies - they (potentially) pay off. We subsidize healthcare for poor people because it saves us money in the long run. We subsidize infrastructure because it helps the economy. We subsidize critical manufacturers for national security reasons.
How is it you're reading "x is subsidized" - a simple fact - to mean "subsidizing x is bad" - a matter of opinion that varies from subsidy to subsidy and company to company?
"A subsidy, subvention or government incentive is a type of government expenditure which redistributes from tax payers to individuals, households, or businesses. Subsidies take various forms, such as direct government expenditures, tax incentives, soft loans, price support, and government provision of goods and services."
> How is it you're reading "x is subsidized" - a simple fact - to mean "subsidizing x is bad" - a matter of opinion that varies from subsidy to subsidy and company to company?
You and I, and everyone else, knows what "Musk got subsidies" means to the mentally reddited of the world:
>the US government giving sacks full of cash to Musk just because it feels like it.
No, I'm saying that when the Post puts out an article shouting about "$38 billion" going to Musk, many, many people are going to take away from that that "Musk received $38 billion in grants, gifts, and otherwise free money from taxpayers". What was your purpose in insta-citing that article, as opposed to pointing to the one NASA program for funding promising booster designs, complete with strict standards at various milestones, that helped fund (in addition to $100 million, essentially every cent of Musk's PayPal fortune) resulted in the Falcon 1 two decades ago?
I'll answer my own rhetorical question. Your implication is that every single thing Musk and Musk's companies are doing today—Dragon, Crew Dragon, Falcon 9, Starship, xAI, Tesla, etc., etc.—are "subsidized"—again, with the "sacks of free money with dollar signs painted on them" connotation—because of that Falcon 1 program two decades ago. If believing that makes you feel better about the accomplishments of someone you admit to greatly disliking, congratulations.
And before you deny doing so, you are the one who wrote
>> Starlink didn't get any subsidies.
>If you don't count the launcher it rides on, and the company that owns both.
> many, many people are going to take away from that that "Musk received $38 billion in grants, gifts, and otherwise free money from taxpayers"
Maybe you're projecting your own beliefs about government subsidizing things a little on other people. The government made a risky bet; that's one of the important things governments exist for. Sometimes they pay off (SpaceX), sometimes they don't (Starliner).
Perhaps the next time someone correctly notes SpaceX got subsidized you might lead with the clear positive cost savings you eventually defended them with?
> What was your purpose in insta-citing that article…
It was the first reputable source that came up in Google? It gives several specifics that directly match the Wikipedia definition of a subsidy?
> because of that Falcon 1 program two decades ago
Falcon 1 got them the subsidies. It was the most unsubsidized part of SpaceX!
> If believing that makes you feel better about the accomplishments of someone you admit to greatly disliking, congratulations.
I can be a big SpaceX fan and still wish the man running it hadn't gotten brainworms.
> And before you deny doing so, you are the one who wrote…
Why would I deny that? I asserted Starlink has been subsidized, and stand by that claim. I'd thought we'd settled that point handily by now.
>Falcon 1 got them the subsidies. It was the most unsubsidized part of SpaceX!
mfw
>I asserted Starlink has been subsidized, and stand by that claim. I'd thought we'd settled that point handily by now.
And here you were questioning my need to speak to the mentally reddited.
Even accepting the notion that a small NASA pay-for-performance program = "subsidy" = Falcon 1 (with Musk throwing his entire $100 million fortune into starting a cockamamie rocket startup despite having zero experience in the field having absolutely nothing to do with the rocket meeting the program's goals, of course), name the subsidies that resulted in Falcon 9, in vertical-landing Falcon 9, in Dragon, in Crew Dragon, in Starship, in Starlink, in Starshield. (And before you say it, Starlink was turned down for the FCC rural subsidy.)
>Perhaps the next time someone correctly notes SpaceX got subsidized you might lead with the clear positive cost savings you eventually defended them with?
As I said,
>Your implication is that every single thing Musk and Musk's companies are doing today—Dragon, Crew Dragon, Falcon 9, Starship, xAI, Tesla, etc., etc.—are "subsidized"—again, with the "sacks of free money with dollar signs painted on them" connotation—because of that Falcon 1 program two decades ago.
> Even accepting the notion that a small NASA pay-for-performance program = "subsidy" = Falcon 1 (with Musk throwing his entire $100 million fortune into starting a cockamamie rocket startup despite having zero experience in the field having absolutely nothing to do with the rocket meeting the program's goals, of course), name the subsidies that resulted in Falcon 9, in vertical-landing Falcon 9, in Dragon, in Crew Dragon, in Starship, in Starlink, in Starshield.
"Subsidies take various forms, such as direct government expenditures, tax incentives, soft loans, price support, and government provision of goods and services."
Tesla received low-interest loans (and tax credits for their customers). SpaceX was given funds (that'll be "direct government expenditures") to develop the Falcon 9, Cargo Dragon, and Crew Dragon (and now the lunar lander). Those funds were not conditional on completion of the program (as we've seen with Starliner); they were R&D funding in milestones in hopes of a functional spacecraft at the end.
> with Musk throwing his entire $100 million fortune into starting a cockamamie rocket startup despite having zero experience in the field having absolutely nothing to do with the rocket meeting the program's goals, of course
Again with the strawmen.
"You got subsidies" and "you had nothing to do with the success" are wildly different statements. You can be both an extremely hard worker and supergenius and still need government support for your very expensive good idea.
> Your implication is that every single thing Musk and Musk's companies are doing today—Dragon, Crew Dragon, Falcon 9, Starship, xAI, Tesla, etc., etc.—are "subsidized"—again, with the "sacks of free money with dollar signs painted on them" connotation—because of that Falcon 1 program two decades ago.
No, the opposite. Falcon 1 is the single least subsidized part of it. It was the one big bit Musk completely self-funded.
They demonstrated an ability to get to orbit (after almost going bankrupt), which gave NASA the confidence to subsidize them in a larger project.
Starlink was granted $880m from the FCC, but later defaulted on conditions, so didn't get most of the money.
Starshield, on the other hand, has been directly funded by the US government to the tune of ~$9b in reported funding (much of it NRO or Space Force classified). It has ~250 satellites up as of now.
> A subsidy, subvention or government incentive is a type of government expenditure which redistributes from tax payers to individuals, households, or businesses. Subsidies take various forms, such as direct government expenditures, tax incentives, soft loans, price support, and government provision of goods and services.
SpaceX benefited from the italicized items in this definition.
icbms and hypersonics exist, theres no defense against the top end anywhere atm.
if you're in a war where people are shooting your satellites out of the sky you're past the point where defenses matter. theres no grey war in space like russia hiring people to blow up stuff in europe and very few states could take out multiple satellites in space.
beyond that if we ever did get to that point, you could develop anti missile tech in space, you effectively have the high ground sitting at the top of the gravity well.
I'm reasonably sure there are more states that could destroy a satellite than hit infrastructure on US soil. And if you try to use an ICBM to hit the US then you risk getting nuked.
> people are shooting your satellites out of the sky
If space powers have any sense at all they'll develop a fleet of satellites that deploy small limpet craft that attach to the enemies' satellites and drag them toward earth.
Literal shooting sounds like mutually assured satellite destruction.
This. Orbital debris are an area denial attack, and since there's only one shared planetary orbit (in aggregate), debris-creating weapons are more like biological weapons, poison gas, and tactical nuclear weapons. Even if you win, you've impeded yourself.
The internationally hoped for outcome should be that China continues scaling their orbital use, to the point where it becomes mutually advantageous to sign a treaty with the US banning orbital debris-creating weapons (and ideally imposing mutually-supported consequences on non-signatories who breach the agreement).
Then everyone would be left with more sane options of disabling-only (microwave, laser, targeted EMP, etc).
It's really about bandwidth and availability - US satcom systems were really struggling, and the only truly global (Iridium) was quite low bandwidth. Starlink is essentially "Iridium with newer tech and mass production" and IIRC DoD through various fronts put quite a lot of early financing to make it a thing, even if later the networks were supposedly disaggregated (would make sense to start building separate one once PoC was proven)
DoD financing for Starlink was a long term game to create pLEO sensing capabilities: initially GMTI, then AMTI.
Both of which give the US military more persistent (revisit delay near zero because number of assets) and survivable (number of assets + LEO debris characteristics + cattle vs pets) ISTAR.
And an advantage in persistent ISTAR is a key enabler of the way the US military is aiming to fight a peer state adversary.
I'd be fascinated to dig into the contracts, but at 10,000' it's DoD offloading the bulk of the development cost onto NASA and the public (which in both cases, still gets good value for money).
Department of defense. Persistent low earth orbit. Ground moving target indicator. Air moving target indicator. Low earth orbit. Intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition, and reconnaissance. National aeronautics and space administration
Looked back on this and correction: proliferated Low Earth Orbit
Newer acronym, but apparently en vogue with the "How do we maintain a critical military space capability against someone who can shoot down exquisite satellites?" crowd.
Yeah similar to the AWS data cneter getting trashed in UAE by cheap drones and short range missiles. I think only 3 states have the capabilities necessary to knock out satellites , and one or two others with latent potential.
For the rest of the planet its basically untouchable unless theres more wisespread proliferation in missile tech.
Businesses run anywhere real money can be made. Middle east is the most volatile place. Yet, the businesses are perfectly okay building infrastructure to extract, refine and ship oil from there.
If real money can be made, there is no need of datacenters in space. Offer some country some money and they'll let you build whatever you want. The whole idea is entirely unprofitable thats why they are making up things that won't work economically. Keep giving us money indefinitely, we'll keep spending, money can be made after a few decades of spending ... trust us.
India, a country which has neither power nor water or any measurable infrastructure is giving massive subsidies to hyperscalers to build AI DCs. They get free land (very very costly), nearly free energy, guaranteed supply of water and so on ...
Examples of one authoritarian govt and one democratic govt. And there are 180+ other countries.
just to add a few more reasons not mentioned on X why they chose this place:
Cooling is a major factor. Ulanqab's average temperature is about 4.3°C, enabling free air cooling nearly 10 months a year and very low PUE around 1.1.
Even more decisive is cheap, abundant power—largely wind and solar plus coal—at roughly half the price of eastern China. Add vast open land, dedicated low-latency fiber to Beijing (~2-5 ms),
It actually abuts Hebei which puts it in striking distance of Beijing. I wonder about water though, it’s just grassland so there can’t be much to spare. It would be like building a data center in eastern Oregon.
They would need closed loop cooling for the months that weren’t cold enough, well, they would probably need it anyways just that it would be more efficient in the long bitter winter. The extra clean energy from wind and solar might make that reasonable though.
The enormous water usage values are generally about powerplants providing the power, and even the better reports on that include water use by hydroelectric plants - which makes sense in context of the report, but that context nor sense isn't understood by journalists and hype-men quoting just "trillions of gallons a year, more than X cities"
Honestly, India might be more democratic than China, but the current govt is known for it's authoritarian bent [1] and crony capitalism [2] in particular.
While governments of all types rushed to embrace AI data centers, perhaps driven by fears of being left out, the pushback against data centers seems to be universal. The difference is, countries with less authoritarian govenrments are seeing those pushbacks be generally more successful.
[1] The Chief Election Commissioner was recently caught manipulating voter rolls over the written objections of the other two election commissioners. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqkgw68yjg29o
[2] The transport minister came under flak after pushing a rushed transition to higher ethanol fuel blends. It transpired that his sons just happened to have set up ethanol factories just before the policy was announced and their net worth went up by 5000%. https://www.bhaskarenglish.in/originals/news/whye20-fuel-put...
> You'd need a dictatorship where people's voices don't matter, but then there's no right of ownership either.
And there are plenty of those countries. As well as countries that aren't dictatorships. Every leader everywhere is available for sale. In democracies, usually for a small sum. Dictatorships ask for a percentage of profit.
Trump will gladly allow datacenters to be built on federal lands. Just like he allows Oil/Coal and bans Wind and Solar. The only reason there is new story of Space Datacenters is because even if they are given everything by the Govt, it simply won't work.
The same argument holds for AI DCs. If you can build profitable AI datacenters in space, why can't you build profitable AI datacenters on Earth? The only reason is you can't build profitable AI datacenters on earth. Just give us a few more trillions and wait a decade or two, we promise ...
This idea that space is a way to get out of the reach of NIMBYs is so dumb.
a: now you’re in everyone’s back yard, since satellites in orbit can be seen by the naked eye at twilight zipping across the sky, so now the whole earth hates you
b: you are still launching from earth, which is a pretty significant target if you’re worried about ecoterrorism.
When I looked it up earlier, it seemed to me that to scale this up we would require larger rockets than Starship if we cannot launch hundreds of times per day.
Cost is one thing, the other is whether it will be permitted at all.
Then there's the power grid problem.
I understand expanding the grid takes a long time, thus the gas turbines. Which I understand are also supply-constrained, and environmentalists are not happy either.
I'm no scientist or financial analyst, but I could imagine that the space thing would be viable especially in a scenario where AI capabilities continue to grow.
If AI really does replace not only most knowledge work but also other labor via robotics, and this requires enormous compute, we are going to want to scale this up at a much faster rate.
Preferably without covering a tenth of the planet with gas generators.
Are we, though? Going to want to scale this up, I mean.
Unless economic systems around the world change significantly very soon, this AI replacement you so cavalierly mention would cause significant portion of human population to reach poverty, causing much unrest and mass deaths.
I don't buy into demonizing the rich, including Altman, Amodei, Musk and co.
I am not concerned that this will be the outcome of the productivity surge.
We will have enough for everyone, and ensuring comfortable living standards for the general population is going to be in the interest of those in power, even if you assume very selfish motivations.
I'd also like to point out that both Anthropic and OpenAI created frameworks to monitor labor market impact and propose responses.
There are significant differences in feasibility and cost between putting something in low Earth orbit (or even very low orbit like Starlink) and putting it in any other orbit around anything else - like easily 2-5x depending on where you're going to put it. I'll leave it to the Kerbal Space Program veterans to explain the mechanics that also make it much more difficult to actually launch and deploy successfully unless you're happy with just having the DC arbitrarily orbit around the sun (and drift year-by-year).
Once you move outside low Earth orbit (i.e. outside the magnetosphere) you also have to deal with much more radiation so using regular commercially available hardware for the DC is no longer an option so you're looking at another 10-100x increase in cost for the chips alone (and at worse performance because radiation-hardened chips are literally generations behind at this point). You'll also need signficantly more (very heavy) shielding and that also adds to your launch costs. Of course OceanGate is a good reminder that billionaires don't always concern themselves with such trivialities as using equipment and materials actually suited for the task if it means they get an opportunity to brag about how they're disrupting the market by jerry-rigging mission critical components.
Speaking in terms of feasibility again, availability isn't the only problem you'd be facing. Obviously latency is going to be horrendous because of the incredible distances involved but really there's just literally no infrastructure you can piggyback off of. You could potentially achieve data rates of up to tens of Gbit/s even from L4/L5 (stable orbits 1 AU away) using something like NASA's DCOS but this requires optical ground stations or LEO relays, bringing the weakest link much more within reach again.
Even if you somehow manage to develop sufficiently ruggedized variants of reasonably modern chips, add the necessary shielding and develop and build out the necessary communication infrastructure from scratch (remember that we haven't even considered how we generate enough power to run the actual DC itself) and are also willing to accept the disgusting latency and packet loss ratio, the elephant in the room remains that DCs on the ground require constant maintenance to operate and replace failing parts. DCs in space can only ever be disposable - once any redundancies run out, they're just very expensive space junk.
But you have a point: putting it in space is inherently ridiculously expensive. Getting it to L4/L5 is only insignificantly more expensive than getting it to L1/L2 but assuming you can fit the entire DC in a single Falcon Heavy (so you don't also have to worry about assembling the entire thing in space across multiple launches) you're limited to a payload of 25 t and the launch itself already costs you $120 million. Of those 25 t only 7 t or so can be spent on actual compute so your space DC would probably be constrained to the equivalent of about 500 GPUs (assuming this is for AI because everything is for AI these days). Most of the weight budget and the actual cost however would be eaten by all the structural and infrastructural parts required - in terms of cost for compute a space DC that fits in a single Falcon Heavy is easily an order of magnitude more expensive than one built in the US today and those don't need to be replaced from scratch when a significant chunk of the initial parts have degraded.
TL;DR: Building a DC in space is easily 10x as expensive, requires technology that hasn't been developed yet, requires you to also build all infrastructure needed to actually operate and connect to it, and in the end just gives you a high latency low performance Beowulf cluster that is rapidly converting itself into an expensive piece of space junk if random debris doesn't kill it first.
You based all your objections on a faulty premise. Orbital data centers are all designed to be distributed across hundreds or thousands of satellites, not one monolithic satellite.
I was responding to the suggestion to put them further away than low Earth orbit. Using "hundreds or thousands of satellites" would literally only make every problem I described worse, not easier, so I assume you missed that part and want to argue the merits of running what's essentially a botnet in low Earth orbit and calling that a "data center". Fine by me although I'm not sure why you decided to respond to me in particular.
You can run compute in low Earth orbit but compute runs hot. We're not talking 500 GPUs a pop but even for an 8 GPU node you need some 40 m^2 surface just for thermal dissipation. I assume by "distributed" you also imply that they're not going to be in sunlight 24/7 and operate more like Starlink so they'll need batteries to keep running for a third or so of their lifetime.
Low Earth orbit also means you don't have to worry about radiation frying your off-the-shelf hardware without the heavy shielding but you'll still have lots of random bit flipping to deal with and storage is largely going to be unreliable for anything but short-term, especially on SSDs.
Distributed also means you replace local speeds with network speeds - Google was only able to achieve feasible "data center" data rates by having satellites fly within less than a kilometer of each other (i.e. densely packed in space terms, no longer really "distributed" in terms of proximity) and even that had orders of magnitudes worse latency (obviously) than you'd have in a data center pod (though not quite as bad as the multi-millisecond latency you'd have at current Starlink level distances).
"Orbital data centers", even if operated as fleets of disposable low-performance pods instead of singular "out of reach" disposable mini DCs, are worse than real data centers on every single metric: they're slower, more expensive, unrepairable, degrade more rapidly and require more redundancy to compensate for random errors.
There are pretty much just three use cases:
- Providing space-based processing for space-based data collection to reduce the amount of data that needs be sent to ground (realistically speaking in the current climate this pretty much only describes surveillance).
- Avoiding regulatory oversight, permit processes and most risks (e.g. earthquakes, missile strikes, protests, sabotage) associated with building and operating a real data center.
- Avoiding energy price increases that might make operating a real data center more expensive compared to the fixed cost of continuing to operate an already launched satellite.
I'm surprised nobody seems to have pointed this out but one of the biggest factors in the premises that would make this entire idea somewhat economically viable (assuming energy prices increase in ways that affect data centers without also massovely affecting the supply chain for launching things into space) is Musk's claim that they not only can make the upper stages reusable and recover them but also that inspecting, refurbishing and reusing them will be considerably cheaper than replacing them. If they can't make launches significantly cheaper still (not that they aren't already ridiculously cheap all things considered), using a fleet "designed to be distributed across hundreds or thousands of satellites" would be economically unviable compared to just stuffing a single satellite to the brim (especially if you can avoid the battery).
But then the single advantage becomes "it's in space" and that is really only interesting for compute running on data already collected in space - and if that is a problem big enough to be able to sustain an entire business model justifying SpaceX's valuation... well, let's just say that would be the kind of world where if it were a movie the major plot point would be the destruction of that company or defeating the regime that enables it.
> b: you are still launching from earth, which is a pretty significant target if you’re worried about ecoterrorism.
This so much. Good luck destroying a DC on earth without a very strong force. On the other hand, destroying a rocket on its launchpad just take one FPV drone.
> Good luck destroying a DC on earth without a very strong force.
Leaving aside the DCs already destroyed in the Iran totally not a War by an enemy that can be easily crushed at any moment ...
DCs in mainland US aren't well defended - a pattern of shrapnel heads landed by a mobile mortar or two with a 2 km radius would render most in need of some upkeep.
Sure, but in my view any organized actor with military hardware in their hands count as a “very strong force” when compared to the average Joe with a Molotov cocktail. And Iran, as a state actor with ballistic capabilities is obviously one as well.
A couple of rednecks in a pickup with a mortar is far from "a very strong force"; consider how you would upgrade their description if they additionally had three helicopters, now describe them if additionally their numbers doubled, now throw in a couple of tanks.
When you start describing rabble level opposition that high you run out of ceiling very quickly.
The US is filled with ex service personal who can whip together a mortar, as "military hardware" goes it's on par with what civilian firework techs have access to and can build in a garden shed, it's home grown resistance level guerilla tech.
If there's growing ground swell opposition to US data centres then the same Y'All-Qaeda militia plotting against dams and power substations will feel empowered to have a shot at a DC or too.
If you consider a full fledged insurgency in a civil war setting, you're very far from “one angry dude throwing a molotov cocktail at Sam Altman's DC” that was the original point.
I don't think the US have the social fabric needed for an insurgency to develop on though.
> If you consider a full fledged insurgency in a civil war setting
Who said anything about civil war?
The US has many splinter loon groups who blow up buildings and like to attack infrastructure (see: US news). This has happened over the past decades with no civil war.
Data centres are soft targets - softer than banks. Do you remember when armed bank robberies were all the rage in the 1970s and 1980s? Not a time of civil war, just a time when a couple of people took control of buildings while heavily armed. Such a small group with fragmentation grenades can easily render a data centre unfit for use for several months with relative ease and fast ingress and egress.
Armed robberies are done with profit motives by professionalized members of the organized crime. By definition these people have access to the kind of organization and weapons you need to mount such attacks.
Politically motivated armed attacks are a totally different thing.
Also, I think you massively underestimate the sheer size of an IA data center. If you want to destroy one with grenades you're going to need a literal truck load of grenades.
> Armed robberies are done with profit motives by professionalized members of the organized crime. By definition these people have access to the kind of organization and weapons you need to mount such attacks.
Really? Maybe read up some more, OC scale mafia groups weren't doing many of the bank raids of the US 1970s / 1980s - in any case these are still well below my bar on what constitutes a "very strong force".
> Also, I think you massively underestimate the sheer size of an IA data center.
You think wrong.
> If you want to destroy one with grenades you're going to need a literal truck load of grenades.
Exactly right, or rather several drums of farm grade fertiliser, diesel, ball bearings, a stolen truck, and somebody (or two) prepared to do a ram raid. Groomed idealogues or addicts with debt have all been used for such things.
Or, as already mentioned, drive parallel and mortar the centre from one end to the other, achievable by small discontent militia types (who abound in the US).
Serious question time: Are you honestly unaware of Timothy McVeigh? Would you describe him as "a very strong force"?
Your idea is that because AI or data centers are supposedly 'entirely unprofitable', they want to expend even more capital to do it in space with less profit?
And somehow most of the replies seem to be about terrorism. What a comment section.
I'd expect the discussion to be a bit more focused on the scalability and solar power..
I think you are dramatically underestimating the terrorism concern. From public news reports we know almost 400 Flock cameras have been destroyed in acts of widespread grassroots criminal vandalism, and I am sure Flock knows the much higher true number. Likewise for Waymo, we know of at least half a dozen vehicles destroyed and at least two dozen temporarily disabled, and I am similarly sure Waymo knows the much higher true number. From the point of view of a data center executive who has chatted to a Flock or Waymo executive at a social event in the last few years, the risk of vandalism/terrorism is neither hypothetical nor plausible, but literally real and already happening.
"But what about cooling?" is a tell-tale sign of people not knowing much about space systems and acting as experts.
Cooling in space is a solved problem for these designs, by construction. They start with existing, flight-proven systems that handle some N KW of heat rejection in space, and shape they payload to require less than N KW of heat, meaning they can technically use existing design as platform and swap out the payload (there is devil in the details around integration here).
That's why there's little weight in papers about this, and they instead focus on actually novel challenges (like operating ML hardware in high-radiation environments).
But yes, I too expected the discussion to be more substantial. As it is, we have a rehash from discussion on that "ML in space" paper from ~6 months ago, which solved thermals by construction and explained how this makes economic sense, and people 100% ignored that, and all comments were a mix of "it makes no economic sense" and "have they thought about how to cool it?".
"We know how to vent heat" and "we know how to vent enough heat that this becomes economical" are two different things. Can we deploy computers in space? Absolutely. Can we deploy a shitload of computers in space that are running extremely compute intensive tasks on a continuous basis?
That's the "is it economical?" question, and to spoil the answer, "with the way launch prices have been dropping in last few years, yes".
(Also the larger question of "relative to datacenters on the ground" is answered by "yes, if you want clean power for it" - turns out moving compute up is more economical than beaming power from space, and costs down here are becoming dominated by land price anyway.)
> in space that are running extremely compute intensive tasks on a continuous basis?
"Extremely compute intensive tasks" is just elaborate and overspecific way of saying "requires N KW of power".
There is nothing magical about compute here, power is power - it doesn't matter whether you spend it on ML, or collecting photons and radioing them back to Earth, or broadcasting a high-precision clock. You need some N KW to run = you need to collect that much, and you need to reject that much of it as heat[0].
--
[0] - That + whatever extra heat you absorb from the Sun.
The disadvantage is that your power generation infrastructure needs replacing at the same time as your chips (at least under current designs) which negates any advantage of needing fewer solar panels at any one point in time and less energy storage.
Also you have to pay for them to be launched, which isn't cheap even if you're SpaceX.
Why stop somewhere in between? You can go straight to the Sun and directly tap into near infinite source of energy. No need of solar panels, direct access to thermonuclear energy, too cheap to meter. The economics already works out, zero capex, zero opex for the next ~4 billion years. Just needs a few small problems to be worked out, like a pipe to transfer energy.
I guess we'll see if their idea warrants your ludicrous comparison soon. Google is putting out a lot of real resources to test theirs out, so presumably it wasn't obviously insane to them when they ran the numbers.
That's usually in hindsight? And I said it wasn't obviously insane to them, not that it would pencil out in the end.
Can also just be an asymmetric bet - relatively small outlay with low chance of working, but massive upside if it does, such that it's still positive expected value.
But mostly, I think all these armchair quarterbacks should not have very strong opinions about something that they almost certainly don't know much about compared to the people who build these. The person I responded to cited a random blog that ran some numbers, and includes such gems as "In space, a broken fan or a fried motherboard is a crisis." Just... lol
There are lots of motivations other than "this could be a profitable project". Something can be completely insane in a monetary way while not being insane in other ways. A pilot project being built is pretty weak evidence of larger practicality.
Easy enough to do with a long tall stalactite shaped satelite.
Getting it up there and unfolding is an engineering problem, but if you have about 5 times the height as the width of your solar facing front it’s just a matter of moving heat around internally
No it's also all the minor problems: lubricants don't flow the same, grease dries out on bearings, rocket launches shake the hell out of their payloads, the thermal differentials across a structure are enormous, vibration doesn't damp into the earth it just rings through the structure till it's lost as heat.
All solvable, but all difficult and unexpected problems which make everything about operating in space difficult.
And probably the biggest one: absolutely no possibility of service or cheap replacement (sure you don't repair a computer on earth, but you don't need a rocket launch to put a new rack in).
> It's much easier for Russia to destroy data centers in orbit.
Nope. Depending on the number of satellites in the constellation, it could be very hard or impossible. Russia has only so many orbital-class interceptors.
You may want to read up on Kessler syndrome more if you think a few anti satellite hits would start it, or that it would be quick. (Hint: the original paper postulates decades.)
Access to unlimited almost free energy is the main point.
Other than that you don't need to deal with local politics.
Other than that it can actually be a faster round trip (if the satellite combines both connectivity to/from Earth and compute) if you don't have a local datacenter.
Yes, the physics are worse, and yes, the economics are worse, but data centers in space have the crucial advantage that they are out of range of the molotov-throwing arm of Joe Public (recently unemployed).
So are container ships in international waters. Put them there.
"Guys with guns" can be found to work for pretty much anyone willing to pay them. Organizations don't struggle to recruit hired guns for organisations that are illegal or regarded by much of the public as akin to the Gestapo, they're not going to collectively boycott guarding buildings housing the cute little chatbot on their phone out of social impact concerns.
People are how and why things work at all. Wealth hoarders obsessively try to eliminate "the human element" because people are also going to turn on you when you mistreat them long enough. Given that we're already talking about space-based data centers, economic efficiency has long gone out the window as a justification for the "need" to remove humans from the equation.
The problem is that try as they might, you can't have it both ways: society requires people cooperating in order to maintain the systems they take for granted but at the same time they do everything to disrupt cooperation and to isolate themselves from people because people have every reason to hate their guts.
It's the ultimate "anarcho-capitalist" folly: in order to enforce a vastly disproportionate property claim (i.e. significantly more than your "fair share" by many orders of magnitude) you need to be able to maintain a vastly disproportionate threat of violence (i.e. significantly more than you could physically deal out yourself by many orders of magnitude) but at this kind of scale the only way to do so requires you to rely on other people (because at some point even carrying around a nuclear warhead with a dead man switch would no longer be a sufficient deterrent) - states exist to solve exactly this problem (among other things) but they still rely on people cooperating. Even "transhumanism" doesn't solve the problem unless you go the Peter Thiel route and see the end of all human life as a possibly necessary part of the process.
EDIT: To pivot back on-topic: guys with guns may not be an acceptable part of the solution for some companies but they can very much be part of the problem. And considering what Iran and the Houthis (or Ukraine for that matter) have been demonstrating, sometimes even guys with very basic explosives and consumer grade electronics can be enough.
Container ships on popular routes. But they can be sent out to the middle of nowhere and they would be pretty safe I assume. Also, you may be able to just sink the datacenter's core part and only tether a few solar panels to it (or go nuclear). That way the target is minuscule, you get free cooling and even state-level attacks will have a hard time finding/damaging your data center.
There's a lot of sci-fi about the wealthy bringing on an apocalypse so they can rule the world that comes out of it. Two examples on TV now are Fallout (from the video games, obviously) and Silo.
One thing that gives me some small level of comfort is that the billionaires who have the means to make that sort of thing happen don't want to live in bunkers or a radioactive wasteland afterwards. They have it pretty good on Earth as it is now. So there's only so bad things can get (I hope).
To your point, it does feel like we are bouldering towards major disruption, even the unravelling of the fabric of society, thanks to worsening inequality as well as the impacts of AI. In the coming decades we may well have a billion climate refugees. We may have large swathes of the population who have no productive outlet in a world that still requires you to have a job to live. And that could go south very, very quickly.
So I guess my point is that if things get so bad you need to put your AI DC in space to avoid the unwashed masses burning it down, I suspect we'll have far bigger problems long before that becomes an issue.
You assume billionaires and politicians are all-powerful and that they congregate in a secret cabal voting on where to take civilization next. No they live in fear of what other powerful people might do and their reactions to what is perceived risk can really f up everything. Even the most powerful autocrats in the world have to deal with other countries.
Framing it as some Illumianti-like dark room cabal is the wrong way to think about it.
Look at our present woes in the Middle East. We have two nuclear powers who are dragging the world towards economic collapse. I believe that before we reach that economic doomsday scenario or anyone seriously considers deploying nuclear weapons, the money behind those powers will oust those who try to push us past the brink.
To this point, I believe there's a very real possibility that Trump gets 25A'ed next year, meaning the 25th Amendment is invoked to remove him from office.
Putting data centers in Antarctica or extreme north Canadian islands would also put you out of the way of molotov-throwing joe public. Even in space your not safe from the voting public as long as your companies directors are sitting on earth somewhere.
i already countered that argument, but to spell it out: sun synchronous orbits which see the sun all the time are a 1d manifold (approximately) and quite busy already, so they won't come to the rescue.
My point is that SSO isn't "coming to the rescue", it's literally the entire premise of the idea (greater availability of solar power there vs anywhere on earth). I don't buy "there's no more room" as an argument when we're talking about space, even in a relatively crowded set of orbits like SSO.
Russia has (likely) done that already in Poland. But with a constellation using laser interlinks and having multiple ground stations across the world, it becomes a difficult logistical problem.
They're also not controlled by pesky local regulators who are worried about losing elections. By putting them in space it becomes a federal/national defense project, and those regulators are either out of work or compromised or complicit.
I'm going to be fascinated to see how the regulatory arbitrage shakes out long term. What legal provinance applies to infra in space? Does GDPR apply? Can you even enforce GDPR? And you have line of site to users who could connect to it directly, bypassing government-regulated backbones.
GDPR applies regardless of where the data center is located because it applies based on where the user currently resides. Similarly, US laws (including those enabling warrantless surveillance) apply regardless of where the data center is located as long as the owner/customer/controller lives or is based or registered in (or is a subsidiary of an entity that is based or registered in) the US - or if the US decides it has jurisdiction until proven otherwise (cf. Maduro).
You enforce laws the same way you do otherwise: if they are in your jurisdiction and don't comply, you arrest them; if they're in a jursdiction you're friendly with you ask for extradition; if they're in a jurisdiction you're not friendly with and you really need them to cease whatever they ceasen't, you have them accidentally fall out of a high enough window.
You can't shut down a DC in space. But even if someone has moved their DC into space, their terrestial human body is still very easily shut down one way or another. And maybe less gruesomely, so is whatever comms infrastructure they need to maintain in order to actually connect to that DC - if the DC is sufficiently "out of reach" (i.e. not in low Earth orbit) it likely requires optical transmission if it can accomplish any data rate high enough to allow it to be used for something sufficiently annoying and optics are fickle and require careful calibration.
But seriously, us tech nerds routinely underestimate rubber hose cryptoanalyis (cf. XKCD 538). If you can bypass government regulation it's because the government isn't sufficiently interested in making you stop whatever it is you think you need to bypass their regulations to do. If your goal with operating a DC in space is to evade the "regulatory arbitrage", you're literally advertising your intent to operate what will most likely be a criminal enterprise so unless you have sufficient financial resources to exert political leverage in your favor (cf. Musk), you're just asking for trouble.
I dunno, considering how various insurgent groups manage to make some reasonably impressive rocketry, I have to believe that in a few years with AI assistance (abliterate all the things) knocking a LEO satellite out of orbit won't be that much harder than sabotaging an electrical substation.
We're talking about an exceptionally vulnerable target with a perfectly predictable path of travel here. And it's constantly emitting lots of RF making it easy to track. You just have to get near it and explode with shrapnel.
Totally illegal, of course. But it will be within the reach of millions of people if they want to do it.
I don't think "just move to space bro" is going to stop the pitchfork-mob.
I think the failures of most rocket startups to launch even with billions of dollars and thousands of real engineers shows how unlikely this is.
And say you do build an orbital
class rocket and manage to launch it without anyone noticing before you do - how many of e.g. Starlink’s 11,000 satellites will you be able to damage? What real impact will that have on Starlink?
You don’t have to intercept the satellites in orbit, they fall back to earth in a few years on their own. What SpaceX et al need to defend against is attacks while they are still on the ground or seconds after launch. Next round of investment will put the factories on the moon (only then will we see calls from the general public to Blow Up the Moon)
Back of the napkin math says a bare minimum of ~2000kg of solid fuel in three stages to “get to” GEO using a 3-stage rocket, to deliver 1kg of “something.” You’d need a gravity assist highly elliptical orbit which is a touch harder to pull off (but probably not harder than getting 2000kg of ammonium perchlorate). Plus building the actual rocket, guidance computer, etc.
Not trivial but not impossible. If you’ve got a few hundred million people with nothing better to do, I’m sure a few dozen/hundred could pull it off.
People who could do it successfully would hardy be considered morons. That would be a genius engineer.
The general attitude in this thread against reasonable people not wanting unsustainable megaliths that produce horrible amounts of noise, and are driving up electricity prices, in their communities without any input from said community is astonishing.
HN has really gone full AI derangement syndrome (it runs both directions).
The majority will not do it successfully. Rocket science is notoriously hard. Hopefully, there will be no incentives to go to such lengths.
Sending unguided rockets in the general direction of the enemy with 25% failure rate doesn't scale well to a 3-stage precision guided delivery vehicle.
It's not like people actually need satellites. We already have ground-based communication in the form of mobile phone networks etc., so I don't think the harm of making LEO unusable would be very great.
I suggest talking to people in Ukraine or Africa or even rural US or Europe before you so blithely take away their access to healthcare, education and communication.
This is what AI was fucking promoted as being for! The utopia where machines do all our work and we receive universal basic income to enjoy our freedoms.
Taking away work was exactly the premise it was sold under.
The promise is that it'll make producing goods and services more efficient, like just about every other invention in human history. As always, that does put some people out of work in the short term, but it doesn't increase unemployment over the long term, and it makes all of society richer, not just the few who invented it.
You need to end scarcity to end money. That means dilithium crystals, replicators and virtually infinite energy.
Real basic income will be a lot less like Star Trek and a lot more like The Expanse.
Also, revolutions are rarely ever started by the lower class. They're always started by the middle tier of society, enraging those helpful idiots lower than them to attack those above them. They end up with many dead and many suffering. Those who cry out for revolution have never seen the horrors of war.
> “I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell. … You people of the South don’t know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization! You people speak so lightly of war; you don’t know what you’re talking about. War is a terrible thing! … War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.”
> You need to end scarcity to end money. That means dilithium crystals, replicators and virtually infinite energy.
That will never happen and capitalism is pretty creative in creating artificial scarcities.
You are far too naive if you think there is a non-bloody way to basically remove the wall between the classes, and that those in power will not try to do everything they can to keep their wealth and "higher lifestyle".
The evidence I've seen suggests that the most common source of scarcity is restrictions on trade, like taxation.
"What if we had taxed the internet?
"What was once framed as a trivial tax—half a cent to download a photo, or a cent to send 100 emails—would now cost the average American household an estimated $784,000 per year."
AI being able to work for us does not mean that AI reduces employment. Every form of automation does work for us. But there is no limit to how much work can be done. And there are things that humans uniquely do that AI will never be able to do because we will never want to create AI as dangerous as human intelligence, but those same traits that make human intelligence dangerous also provide it with unique value in many domains.
>This is what AI was fucking promoted as being for! The utopia where machines do all our work and we receive universal basic income to enjoy our freedoms.
No one promised any utopia of any sort. The only promise was that AI would put people out of work. The rest is just some naive Star Trek bullshit that was never on the table.
I can tell you that almost every single enthusiastic proponent of the technology I've ever spoken to has pretty much guaranteed this is where it takes us... But correct, its naïve as hell.
Regardless of how many reasons you can come up with for real tutors being better than AI tutors, it’s clear that real tutors can’t survive in a market that also has AI. In other industries the accepted ritual for this situation is to genuflect at the Altar of the Invisible Hand and repeat the phrase “Actually, The More Economically Competitive Option Is Better”. (It is understandably harder to swallow this platitude when the industry happens to be “your children’s future”.)
it is insane that we live in a world where knowledge is so cheap and gets cheaper and more accessible every year, and yet people complain non stop and somehow make worse decisions.
You and he are using “understand” differently. You’re talking about understanding the internals, the components and concepts inside the box labeled “technology”; he’s talking about understanding the externalities, where that box is moving and how fast, how the box affects and alters the world around it.
Fair, but I also think that kids aren't any better at seeing the externalities. Kids are very good at following what is "hip" and it's currently in vogue to dislike AI. But just because their influencer-doom-scroll-fed brains are currently hearing "AI Bad" doesn't mean they have any actual understanding.
I'm sure this is some kind of logical fallacy but: show me a kind not on TikTok/Reels/IG/brainrot that has a coherent argument against AI and I'll be interested in listening. Outside that it's all echo chambers on social media IMHO.
This feels unfalsifiable, because you could reject any coherent argument put forth by saying that they just got this from some social media platform and they don't truly think that. The modern society and system have been picked apart relentlessly, and most of the simple arguments against it are already floating all over the place, including the short-form addiction farms.
The fact you think that not a single one out of hundreds of millions of people has a genuine belief and that they all are just dumb kids being dumb because they're kids and following trends is staggering, I don't think any adult generation has ever had an opinion this extreme about their youth.
Anyway, here's this article[0] that was posted on the NYT about a week ago. It's not about AI, but many of the interviewed kids touch on its future downsides in ways that aren't just "AI bad cuz TikTok". And these kids are young, their worldviews aren't half as coherent as a 16 year old's. They were definitely pre-selected by the editors and probably aren't representative of the average kid, but they represent some of them. That's enough for your request of n=1.
> I don't think any adult generation has ever had an opinion this extreme about their youth.
Literally every adult generation has done this for time immemorial, just like the "kids these days" or "the next generation is screwed because X". I'm not saying no kid can have genuine belief nor was I saying that no kid has a coherent anti-AI argument _but_ this article is talking about slang, just because "that's ai" is slang and has negative connotation does not, for one second, mean that kids using that are actually anti-AI. It's slang, not a policy position.
People are reading way too much into that. In 1 year the slang will have moved on and will not be the basis for how they think about AI. Go look at the history of slang, it's not policy forming in the way it's being presented by some in this thread, that's the issue I have.
Just like when kids my age said "that's gay", that didn't mean they were all homophobic, it was slang. Some of those people grew up to be actual homophobes, some grew up to be gay, some grew up to allies. The same will happen here and none if it will be due to the year/months that it existed as slang.
You know the saying “it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it”? With how many salaries today are dependent on creating negative externalities, I wonder if maybe kids are better at understanding certain things like AI and climate change simply because they don’t have salaries.
I have now seen several people using the “arsonist / forest fire” analogy in the context of the Australian hack, seemingly unaware that Australia does not treat arson and wildfires as acts of god that just happen and you only have yourself to blame for improperly preparing for it, but rather as acts of man that are addressed with things like “total fire ban” (if translated back to the AI context this would ban even individuals using airgapped local models), “levy fines” (e.g. 2M for a 20B corp so if translated back to OpenAI’s context ~1B), and “class action lawsuits” (e.g. 500M for a 10B corp so if translated back to OpenAI’s context ~50B).
Anyway, separate the OAI hack from the billions of hacks that are going to occur over the next few years by AI driven agents. The time for insecure systems is over.
In Australia we have some experience with this scenario (usually with higher temperatures) and some of the measures we have found effective are “total fire bans”, “jail the arsonists for extended periods of time”, and for negligent companies whose insufficient vigilance caused the fire specifically, “levy steep fines” and “find in favor of the plaintiff in class-action lawsuits for significant fractions of the company’s net worth”. Perhaps these measures could be of use here!
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