[odie5533]

This is what concerns me about how AI giants are planning to make money. Their product has already been commoditized at prices which for them are still subsidized to grab market share. Unless the giants invent a technological leap, their prices are going to be dragged down by open weight models and I don't see how they'll turn a profit.

[Jimega36]

Reach AGI to leapfrog whoever is behind. Burn everything to get there faster.

[odie5533]

If Anthropic announced AGI tomorrow, how much better would that model be than Fable 5? It's looking like the road to AGI is gradual and moat-less. Models seem capable of improving other models, and even without illegal distillations many are nipping at the heels of Anthropic.

[InsideOutSanta]

Yeah, I think we're learning that we overestimated the relevance of recursive self-improvement in a singularity/intelligence takeoff scenario. We thought that once an AI could start improving itself, it would cause an exponential, self-reinforcing intelligence explosion.

Turns out that scaling up compute is much more important and also limits the upper end of intelligence.

[AnthonyMouse]

The bigger mistake is assuming it would be better at everything all at once.

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.

[ForHackernews]

What is an "illegal" distillation? Terms of service are not laws, and clearly copyright laws are no barriers to developing AI models.

[dogwalker5000]

If AGI = Data from Star Trek, it would be a huge leap. Frankly, anything less I wouldn’t consider as AGI.

[IncreasePosts]

Why would the creator of AGI sell it to anyone, when they could keep it to themselves and corner dozens of markets?

[jorisw]

'Reach AGI', the same way SpaceX will put data centers in orbit. A pipe dream.

[ben_w]

I'm currently writing a blog post about data centres in orbit, and my current conclusion is that even though they can build one, they definitely can't put 1 million up there and would have better things to do if they could.

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").

[trick-or-treat]

Maybe you missed the part where starlink / orbiting datacenters don't really have to even make money as long as they partially fund rocket launch tests.

Or maybe you don't take Elon seriously when he talks about Mars.

[ben_w]

> Maybe you missed the part where starlink / orbiting datacenters don't really have to even make money as long as they partially fund rocket launch tests.

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∼2035

- section 2.4, https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19468

At $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.

[NitpickLawyer]

> will put data centers in orbit. A pipe dream.

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.

[ben_w]

> You can watch Scott Manley's video on it, where he does some rough calculations and explains the overall architecture.

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.

[InsideOutSanta]

I don't think people's argument is that it's impossible to put data centers into space. The argument is that the downsides (radiation, cooling, maintenance, power) are so severe that it is pointless to do it at scale.

[NitpickLawyer]

Go back to the megathreads when this came up. Even here on HN. Plenty of people used the argument that it can't be done, for various reasons.

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.

[InsideOutSanta]

Reusable boosters have clear upsides, though.

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.

[dogwalker5000]

Yet spacex is losing money … only StarLink is profitable.

[general1465]

Microsoft tried to put datacenters into ocean [1] and then shelved the idea, because even that you have lower amount of failures, you still have failures and somebody has to go there and fix them. Which turns out to be problem.

And in ocean you don't have to solve for radiation nor cooling.

[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/desktops/servers/microsoft-shel...

[IncreasePosts]

If just Elon was taking about data centers in space, you could take it with a grain of salt. But there are other serious players talking about it like Google and blue origin that it should be pretty clear it can't just be dismissed with "you didn't think about cooling!"

[NitpickLawyer]

Yeah, and there's already been tech demonstrators for this. Starcloud-1 launched in '25 (on a F9) and demoed a CotS H100 in a ~60kg bus w/ 1kW of power. They ran inference on a "gemini" model (probably something small) and trained a GPT2 version LLM as a tech demonstrator.

[ForHackernews]

Google also wanted to deliver internet from balloons and put everyone's real name on their YouTube comments. Not all their ideas are winners.

[chpatrick]

I think it's such a vague term. If you showed someone in 2010 what we have now they would say it's science fiction.