[Sevii]

Anthropic needs any compute they can get. So if Elon wants to build orbital data centers Anthropic would be happy to run models on it. There isn't really any doubt Elon can build orbital data centers the question is if they are economical compared to earth based.

[23rf]

I love how this line of thinking completely avoids the issue re. improvements in local models.

I suppose if you are desperate to justify a large investment this what you would do - frame the story in a particular way.

[impulser_]

Local models are always going to be useless unless compute get significantly cheaper, and it's not. TSMC might literally run out of capacity to build any consumer compute product.

Once computer constraints ease up, you will see much larger models. The reason LLM seems to have stalled a bit is because there just not enough compute.

You have more people using AI which requires more compute, and you want to build larger models which requires more compute and you have limited compute. What do you do?

[23rf]

Right.. and computers were once the size of a large room vs now fit into a pocket.

" The reason LLM seems to have stalled a bit is because there just not enough compute."

lol okay mate.

[impulser_]

https://x.ai/news/anthropic-compute-partnership

There is literally not enough compute dude. If we had infinite compute we would see everyone building Mythos size models.

"Right.. and computers were once the size of a large room vs now fit into a pocket."

Yeah because we offload much of the compute to off device. You think we would have these small computers in our pockets if the internet didn't exist?

[s08148692]

> Right.. and computers were once the size of a large room vs now fit into a pocket.

and yet now we have far bigger rooms with far bigger computers anyway

Hardware may improve exponentially, but demand for compute increases double-exponentially. we'll always need more, bigger computers

[cyclopeanutopia]

What are you talking about

There is no doubt that it's not a serious idea.

[charlieflowers]

Help me understand why not? I know solar power generation in space, and "beaming" the power back, was a naive idea. But this would actually use the power up there, mostly for training, but also for inference.

That claim seems reasonable. I have zero knowledge of the economics of launching and maintaining satellites though.

[PufPufPuf]

As I understand it, the problem is cooling. There isn't any medium to take away the heat, so the only option is to slowly radiate it away.

[Gagarin1917]

Which is apparently manageable. Scott Manley isn’t an industry veteran, but he does know a lot about space engineering and science. Here’s his breakdown of the feasibility, and heat management is not really a major issue:

https://youtu.be/DCto6UkBJoI

[throwaway85825]

Heat management is not a technical issue but a reliability issue.

[londons_explore]

These satellites will be in orbits where they are always illuminated. That means constant temperatures, which means no thermal cycling and no reliability concerns.

When people say 'running it hot is bad for reliability', they mean 'running it hot and then brining it back to room temp from time to time will eventually kill it'.

[Sammi]

Anyone who has googled just once to ask if datacenters in space make any sense, has found out they don't because they can't get rid of heat.

That leaves only two kinds of people left who are still talking excitedly about datacenters in space: The uninformed and the grifters.

[dgfl]

The existence of starlink proves that this is false. Look at most current pitches, they don’t talk about GW-class monsters anymore. There’s absolutely nothing stopping a 20-30kW satellite bus the size of starlink (or I guess up to 100kW? once starship is available - it’s all about payload fairing diameter) from hosting ~1 rack of compute and antennas. The economics may or may not make sense, we’ll have to see.

There’s very little research work needed to make this happen; it’s all about engineering some satellite buses and having them fly in close formation to get a “data center”. And this group of satellites in sun-synchronous orbit would relay to a comms constellation e.g. starlink itself) and operate as a global scale data center. The heat management and orbital mechanics are all straight forward really.

[Sammi]

I've heard this before. A datacenter and a starlink sattelite are not in the same ballpark of power usage and heat dissipation needs. The are orders of magnitude off from each other.

[dmlittle]

It's worth noting that GPUs have a much higher failure rate than traditional CPUs. Over 10x the failure rate due thermal stress. The amount of heat generated is very different. You can't really replace a GPU in a satellite (at least today?) which would place most of these satellites as space debris in a ~5 year horizon.

[zbentley]

"Space datacenter" -> overpriced starlink with some shitty edge compute -> "look guys, we built a space datacenter; earnings results to follow" -> number go up.

[aetherspawn]

I don’t think Sun synchronous orbit is possible except in LEO.

LEO is high risk and star link satellites deorbit or burn up all the time. Not good from a capex POV on graphics cards.

[dpkirchner]

How much power could we get out of the fuel required to launch a 20-100kW rack in to space, if we were to burn it on the ground?

[redox99]

The area you need in radiators is only half the area you need in solar panels. So it's definitely not a deal breaker.

Its still very dumb because of economics, logistics, serviceability and more.

[prepend]

Solar on earth was dumb because of logistics, right?

Things get cheaper.

[scottyah]

Pretty much everything has been "very dumb because of economics, logistics, serviceability and more". What kind of hacker are you to be on this site lol

[small_model]

SpaceX have presented on this and it's fairly straightforward and they already do it with starlink satellites, just at a larger scale. Sound like you are the uniformed one (or an EDS victim)

[ceejayoz]

Starlink satellites don't generate the sort of heat a datacenter full of GPUs does. The ISS has enormous radiators, and it's only in space because it's a space station. Putting datacenters there is just goofy given the amount of available space on the ground.

[Sammi]

I've heard this before and these are not comparable at all. Starlink is missing a few digits in it's power usage and heat dissipation needs compared to a datacenter.

[kristjansson]

Why did we start saying EDS this week, just in time for the IPO?

[wbxp99]

EDS? Like still believing Elon's claims are truthful?

[lijok]

what do you mean they can’t get rid of heat? radiators exist

[ceejayoz]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_Active_Thermal_Contro...

All that gets you 70kW of cooling. Radiating to vacuum isn't very efficient.

[joe_mamba]

Space radiators are not very efficient due to lack of airflow in space.

[dzhiurgis]

Scott Manley, I’d say one of the top pop space youtubers say otherwise. If anything it’s easier in space. On earth most complexity in datacenter is cooling. In space you just radiate it away.

And SpaceX already proven they can launch sort of datacenters 10k times by launching Starlink (up to 20KW of solar each IIRC).

FWIW Musk should support Bernie Sanders more. Putting moratoriums on datacenters would make space based ones far more economical.

[vel0city]

He just mentions and walks through idea of having some amount of compute up there and what the heat rejection calculations roughly look like. He doesn't actually explore the economics of doing such a thing or discuss if it's actually worth doing.

It's not that you can't put a server in space, but the costs to do it almost assuredly don't make any sense. Because, if you can do it in space you can do it easier on the ground and save yourself millions in launch cost and extra complexity. Your cooling challenges are way cheaper and simpler in an atmosphere.

There's nothing much being in space really gets you, other than it makes it harder for a government to take your computers away. Not impossible, just harder.

[mcmcmc]

“YouTuber” is an extremely poor qualification for a supposedly trusted source

[runako]

Cost.

The economics don't work unless Starship is doing flights in quantity, and it has met or exceeded its cost targets.

Roughly, a single rack plus solar to power it in the $15m+ range just to launch. (This assumes power dissipation is handled via some means that does not require launch to orbit. Also does not include batteries.) Choose your own hardware for the rack, but call it < $5m.

SpaceX earning $15m every time someone launches a $5m rack would be a great business for SpaceX.

Use your own calculator/LLM, but mine is suggesting that the ~$7B Colossus 1 data center in TFA would be around $50B if launched on Falcon 9 (still ignoring cooling and batteries).

(There are obviously a lot of other asterisks. I'm ignoring power storage and heat dissipation. Maintenance probably doesn't matter given 75% of cost is in the launch. Network bandwidth could be a problem considering how DCs are used. Competition - if Company A spends $100B for $25B of actual AI infra, how competitive will they be against Company B who gets $100B for their $100B by spending it in Canada or Mexico, which they can do right now? Etc.)

None of this works without Starship, which has not set a date for its first LEO insertion test yet. Yet the whole point of orbital DCs is nothing on the ground can move fast enough, hence the rush to orbit...which can't really move at all right now.

No, it doesn't make any sense.

[super256]

In space you get bit flips fairly quickly when using very small transistors. You would have to run stuff on fairly old hardware, which probably makes the whole thing economically inefficient for serious "computation in space".