alt Hacker NewsIt still doesn’t make sense to me. Technological progress will likely only accelerate. These will be outdated within 2 years easily, and you can’t even recover the chips. The only benefits are the unlimited power without the bottlenecks on earth, lack of political pressure of course, and the low latency for processing satellite data since it doesn’t need to be sent down to earth. These don’t seem beneficial enough to waste this money. It would be good to hear from someone who knows more about this.
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> progress will likely only accelerate
I'm guessing this is part of the whole idea; to get data before its actually doable, and the cost is worth the early data to help with future development
GPUs aren’t becoming outdated in practice. An H100 still rents for something like $3/hour. The only reason to take them offline today would be due to limited data centre capacity. In space, that doesn’t apply.
For now, at least, this market doesn’t behave like the one for CPUs which are more fungible and general purpose.
Rather than thinking about the value of a GPU over time, it’s more useful to think about the value of a model (or generation of models) that will run on the GPU.
Sol 6 launched last week. People will build products/agents/systems on Sol 6. Many of those will end up staying on that model for the lifetime of the end product, which means there will be long-term demand for the model, and that means long-term demand for the GPU set that the model runs on.
For now, at least, models are tuned to a specific GPU and don’t move to the newest hardware very easily.
At the end of the day, will the lifetime value of a GPU exceed the cost of launching it into space? That’s TBD. But there’s growing evidence it might.
Not just that, you’re wasting so much compute due to the risk of bit flips. That the case for any hardware you currently have in space, you need some correction mechanism which generally mean computing the same thing multiple times just to ensure correctness. And the cooling story without an atmosphere is also another obvious pretty massive problem. And the risk of losing an entire payload if the rocket fails. Etc…
I see it exactly like Hyperloop, a cynical attempt at putting political pressure. Hyperloop was a known absurd concept that Musk released to block the development of public transport in the US. And that worked. For compute in space, it’s a way to be able to say to municipalities and states „if you don’t let us use the land how we want, with no oversight, no problem, we won’t negotiate with you and just go to space“