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

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 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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NitpickLawyer 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> 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.

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InsideOutSanta an hour ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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NitpickLawyer an hour ago | parent [-]

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 24 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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general1465 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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...

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IncreasePosts an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

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 an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		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 an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Google also wanted to deliver internet from balloons and put everyone's real name on their YouTube comments. Not all their ideas are winners.

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chpatrick 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.