FaceDeer

How would bots be kept out of it?

Okay, he’s a leader of a large religion.

That still doesn’t give him any special knowledge or authority regarding AI.

Specifically sex abuse within the church.

Lots of religions have one of those.

He’s a religious leader, what does he have to do with the tech industry?

At least it doesn’t contain any fire.

Ya know those are overpriced shit, right?

Ya know that’s irrelevant to the point being made, right?

Whatever you may personally think about those products they’re very profitable now.

Whether inference is profitable or not is not a global yes/no question. It depends heavily on the circumstances, what you’re using it for and what you’re charging for it. A lot of the money being invested in research right now is going into making inference cheaper, which would of course make it more profitable to sell at current price points. Or just run it yourself, local models are getting quite capable these days.

I wouldn’t bet on any specific company being the ones to survive this, especially not first-movers like OpenAI. More likely they’ll spend their money blazing the trail and the ones to profit from it will be the ones who followed along behind. When a company goes bankrupt it doesn’t poof out of existence, its assets get sold off at pennies on the dollar and then whoever bought those assets gets a chance at running them without the overhead of the previous company’s debt.

This seems somewhat misleading. Lots of products take a lot of investment in them for many years before they reach profitability. The Boeing 787 Dreamliner, for example, was in development for 7 years and another three years after that before it was profitable. The Falcon 9 rocket took 13 years to develop and now it’s the most profitable satellite launcher around. The Dyson bag-free cyclonic vacuum cleaner took 15 years to develop.

Most of this AI stuff has only been in heavy development since ChatGPT burst upon the scene in 2023. It’s not unreasonable to see the industry still heavily into the investment and development side of things.

I think prohibiting reverse engineering would do far more harm.

I’m told that AI can’t actually replace humans, so presumably those jobs will be back in short order.

Yes, that’s the plan, tens of thousands of satellites. SpaceX has actually proposed a million of them in the long term, this sort of constellation is one of the things that a launcher like Starship is intended to support.

Starlink is already on this scale and that’s just using Falcon 9.

Over and over the “it can’t be cooled” refrain. The math and engineering says otherwise. Here’s a video by Scott Manley that walks you through the calculations. It’s quite straightforward, this is not an obstacle.

Musk is not the only person planning these sorts of satellites.

So don’t pack them as densely as Earth-based data centers are packed.

In another comment in this thread I posted a link to a youtube video by Scott Manley explaining the math and engineering behind cooling computer hardware in space, it’s actually pretty straightforward.

That article was incorrect, then. There are many satellites already in orbit that have computers in them - basically all of them do, nowadays - and cooling them is a well understood engineering problem.

The radiator panels on the ISS are 2,500 square meters in area. The radiator panels are 645 square meters.

Most of the proposals for space-based data centers have ended up focusing on plans to place thousands of individual satellites into orbit, not just one big space station with everything packed inside it. Scott Manley recently did an analysis of the cooling requirements, he worked through all the numbers and explained how it works, and there really doesn’t seem to be a problem here.

Yeah, this is fundamental; if you use a thousand joules of energy to do work (of any kind) you will ultimately end up producing a thousand joules of waste heat. The only choice one has in the matter is where that heat goes.

This is a major reason why I get annoyed at the people pooh-poohing space-based data centers. It literally puts the waste heat outside the environment. It should be everything that data center opponents say they want.

While the current splashy “state of the art” models in terms of cognitive ability are American, IMO the real foundation for future AI is coming out of China these days. It’s not quite as smart but they’re focusing heavily on making AI training and inference cheaper in terms of compute (and therefore more efficient in terms of energy usage). It’s a mother-of-invention situation, sure - they’ve been cut off from the latest and greatest NVIDIA cards so they’re having to find ways to make do with less powerful hardware. But that’s going to be super important once AI is “good enough” for various real world tasks and the most powerful models aren’t needed for most activities.

Indeed, it’s basic thermodynamics. The energy coming in to Earth gets turned into heat one way or another, the only question is where that heat goes. In this case it goes into the ocean either way.