RE: https://infosec.exchange/@jerry/116242195809861609
I know what—I have an even worse business plan! Why don't we build all our new fission reactors IN SPAAACE? That way we'll be safe from the radiation and any meltdowns!
Also me: I am a teapot, short and stout: this is my handle and this is my spout …
/s
@cstross Okay, let me see if I have a handle on this…
⁃ Musk wants to IPO SpaceX.
⁃ So he wants to merge SpaceX and his AI company, because SpaceX looks better if he can glue in the $N-billion investments that he's getting for AI stuff.
⁃ He shouts “AI datacenters in space!" This has no business or economic meaning; it's just stringing VC buzzwords together for a SpaceX/XAI merger.
⁃ Nvidia says “Sure, boss, we can do you an AI-in-space chip.”
Huang, and the entirety of TW will play along as long as they can to keep the US happy. The Chinese threat is such that they will smile and nod to just about any level of stupidity right now and hang onto what they see as their lifeline of survival.
I don't know how long this can last though.
@zarfeblong I think it's the other way around. SpaceX IPO as-is would be fine, a lot of people want to buy it, they have actual tech, product and revenue. Meanwhile xAI is, even by AI company standards, a piece of shit burning through money and recently also losing quite a few top people with not that much to show for it.
Musk would still like his AI though, so the idea is to have people who want to buy SpaceX subsidize xAI. He is also astroturfing the numbers and pulling strings to get the SpaceX+xAI monstrosity into one of the big indexes so index funds would effectively prop up the price. See yesterday's piece on Alphaville: https://www.ft.com/content/59adbe42-ca30-47f3-9cda-5415945e9368 (registration probably required) @cstross
@redsakana @cstross Hm, I did not think of the other way around. Makes sense though.
I will keep an eye out for financial commentary.
@zarfeblong @redsakana @cstross yes, SpaceX is a home for X AI (and X) because it's got revenue and demand already, so it can paper over some of the financial mess. But SpaceX is already way overvalued because launch demand from non-Starlink sources has not picked up, and Starlink while profitable is close to its maximum addressable market already (there are not a billion extra Starlink users to be found.)
I think Patrick Boyle did an OK job walking through it in this video: https://youtu.be/8rS3fTbC7TE
The combination of Space and AI keeps retail interest high to try to get into the indexes in an accelerated schedule before reality hits.
@landley For a while, I figured Twitter was paying its way by providing a pre-sorted data feed for the AI company. (The tulip-craze money comes easier if you can say “Look at all the training data users give me out of the goodness of their hearts!”)
You're probably right that that's run its course though.
@zarfeblong Keeping the data for himself to train grok was an excuse, but not a cash flow.
The historical dataset had already been digested by openai etc long ago, via https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2017/12/update-on-the-twitter-archive-at-the-library-of-congress-2/ and https://www.forbes.com/sites/jenaebarnes/2023/02/03/twitter-ends-its-free-api-heres-who-will-be-affected/ and so on.
The loss of free access coincided with the desirable userbase leaving and bots coming to dominate traffic (https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/10/it-sure-looks-like-x-twitter-has-a-verified-bot-problem/) so nobody else wanted to pay for the current updates anyway.
Charlie Stross
L0wKey
Andrew Plotkin
Dan Sugalski
Not The LBC Guy
Elaine
Trillion Byter
marcink
Seachaint
adamrice
Chu 朱
Simon Richter
redsakana
Mark Gritter
Rob Landley
Robert Banz