Reach AGI to leapfrog whoever is behind. Burn everything to get there faster.
Turns out that scaling up compute is much more important and also limits the upper end of intelligence.
Suppose it can do 80% of what the 20th percentile human can do. That's a huge advance and very useful, but it means there are still things it's not very good at. If any of those things is (or becomes) a bottleneck, you're not getting the hockey stick graph.
AGI? Too loosely defined. They lack a lot of competences which humans recognise when we see them but find it hard to put into words; on the other hand what they can do they already do faster than any human (and have greater breadth than any single human, but this usually doesn't matter because "coder" and "economist" and "translator" gets solved in human teams by hiring three people).
I do not think current ML has the tools to solve for quality. But we know it's possible for a really mediocre intelligence to make human level intelligence, because evolution made us, so for me the question of AGI is more a practical one: is it affordable?
(I also think not at the present time, but that's an "I think" not "I am analyzing it carefully").
Or maybe you don't take Elon seriously when he talks about Mars.
I am only dismissing the orbital data centres, I do see a future for Starlink. One with competition, but a future nonetheless.
I'm old enough to remember the dot.com bubble and "we lose money on each unit and make up for it in scale":
If they don't make sense, they don't help. Putting a single one in space, or even a handful, is physically possible! But even optimistic Alphabet researchers (and Alphabet owns more of SpaceX than the entire IPO) say this only makes sense at $200/kg, while early Starship launch costs while they sort out reusability be at best $400/kg and the researchers don't expect $200/kg until the mid-2030s even with a high launch rate:
If the learning rate is sustained—which would require∼180 Starship launches/year—launch prices could fall to <$200/kg by∼2035At $200/kg, and using the payload estimates elsewhere in the paper (the learning rate is based on mass rather than launch count), they'd need to launch 370,000 tons (4.4 ibid); even at the "good enough" cost, $200/kg, they'd need to spend $200/kg * 3.7e8 kg = $7.4e10. That's a hell of an R&D spend for the next 10 years of a company whose lifetime revenue (not profit) is reportedly $4.6e10.
My current draft has a few thousand words of additional problems, plus a bunch of things which I mention only to say why they are not, and some more where I say the research has yet to be done.
> Or maybe you don't take Elon seriously when he talks about Mars.
Used to, not any more. Has been too slow with Starship even before the fact that iteration with hardware is necessarily slowed down by a 2-year gap between launch windows.
There's not even been any news about demonstration models of either Mars-rated or Starship-rated Sabatier processors, which would be an easy win and also win points for both environmentalism and energy independence viz. Iran/Hormuz.
If you build the DC satellites as currently specified, you're strictly better off not launching them. That's how bad the idea is.
Cheap access to space was once a pipe dream.
Reusable boosters were once a pipe dream.
A new player beating Boeing to the ISS was once a pipe dream.
LEO constellations were once a pipe dream.
Launching thousands of satellites was once a pipe dream.
You should know that a) they are already running "AI" chips on their current sats. and b) they are already producing kW of power on orbit and have ~10k sats on orbit. You can watch Scott Manley's video on it, where he does some rough calculations and explains the overall architecture. There is nothing stopping them to do this, from an engineering perspective. If it makes commercial sense, that's another question, but 5-10-20 years in the future things might change there as well.
And my point was that at one point or the other there were many "downsides" for all the tech that SpaceX already has. Reusable boosters were seen as "uneconomical" and "pointless unless they can fly 10 times" by industry experts. They're now flying 30+times a booster.
LEO constellations were similarly "full of downsides" plus "all the companies that tried it went bankrupt in the 90s", so "it's pointless". And so on.
Pretty much everything about data centers in space is worse than having them on Earth. Apart from niche use cases, the only reason you'd talk about data centers in space is if you had a company with rocket ships and needed a story to tie your rocket ships to the current AI craze.
And in ocean you don't have to solve for radiation nor cooling.
[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/desktops/servers/microsoft-shel...
I'm currently writing a blog post, and there's one big thing everyone, including Scott Manley, missed.
Once I realised it, I wondered what took me so long to spot this issue.
slightly related .. I saw a talk on DCs in space, and it said median Earth orbit had a latency of 500ms .. but back of envelope seems to be : 15,000km above Earth would have around 100ms latency, comparable to internet ping times.
Not an expert, feel free to weigh in.
I'm still working on the blog, but as a quickie: it's the lesson of the Datasaurus dozen, that sometimes you need to look at the actual distribution rather than statistics.
Here's what the safety exclusion zone around a million of them in orbit looks like, if arranged something like the current plan: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/BenWheatley/blog/refs/head...
There's no (safe) gaps. Plenty of physical space, but the safety margin eats it all up. Nothing else is allowed to use those orbital shells or anything between them.
Also, this is what happens if you put them all in a single orbit at the same altitude:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/BenWheatley/blog/refs/head...
> slightly related .. I saw a talk on DCs in space, and it said median Earth orbit had a latency of 500ms .. but back of envelope seems to be : 15,000km above Earth would have around 100ms latency, comparable to internet ping times.
500ms means ~150,000 km travel distance; for that distance as round-trip time from origin to destination and back again means the one-way distance is 75,000 km, so if it's via a single satellite bounce then the average distance to the satellite would be 37,500 km: [You]-37.5Mm-[Satellite]-37.5Mm-[Them]-37.5Mm-[Satellite]-37.5Mm-[You].
I think they must be assuming all comms are via geostationary satellites. In some talks, this is what the speaker actually meant, though they may not have been clear about it; other times, there's talks from people who copied the former but perhaps didn't understand.
For DCs in space, even in GEO, it would be half the distance because you're communicating with the satellite itself not with someone else somewhere else on the ground.
TL;DR: Alphabet researchers (and Alphabet owns more of SpaceX than the entire IPO so if anything they're biased to optimism), recon it will take SpaceX launching about 370,000 tons to orbit before they've even figured out how to get the costs down to the point it makes sense to put these in orbit.
If you don’t care about making any more from it. How exactly would datacenters in space would be more profitable than those on earth?