Elon Musk predicts: "So any given solar panel can do about five times more power in space than on the ground. You also avoid the cost of having batteries to carry you through the night. It’s actually much cheaper to do in space. My prediction is that it will be by far the cheapest place to put AI. It will be space in 36 months or less. Maybe 30 months."
Resolve to YES if this is true by the end of February 2029.
Resolves to NO if it is not.
If the result is not clear to me, this will be evaluated by asking the best-of-three judgment of a panel of the most advanced AIs available at the time from Anthropic, OpenAI and Google, based on the above description and asking for a resolution.
(I realize some people do not like that resolution mechanism but I need to avoid getting bogged down in defining terms and edge cases here.)
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Cheapest for who? If it's cheaper for SpaceXAI to do it than to do terrestrial data centers, would that resolve YES or does it have to be cheaper for everyone?
Context: 3rd party guy (not affiliated with SpaceX or any AI companies) looked at this and concluded it wouldn't work without vertical integration - but SpaceXAI has vertical integration.
To put 1kg into LEO you are talking about 1000-3000$. This already adds huge initial costs. Now add some problems like having trouble to send engineers up there, the need of shielding against radiation (space graded Microchips can cost around 1000000$ simply because of better shielding, small structures like Microchips don't like strong radiation) and the technological risk of your new cooling design. If you can build it on earth it is in 99,99999% of cases cheaper to do so.
"Will space be the cheapest place to put Elon by end of Feb 2029?"
https://manifold.markets/Lobstertronic/will-space-be-the-cheapest-place-to-qPtuR2pN9q?r=TG9ic3RlcnRyb25pYw
@PeterMcCluskey He does not mean the latter lol he thinks the only serious cost consideration for space is, no batteries (but you would still need batteries, even a dawn-dusk Sun-synchronous orbit results in SOME darkness).
Remember this is the same ketamine addict who thinks space launches will soon be as cheap as cargo planes
@ChurlishGambit In the Dwarkesh podcast it sounded more like marginal cost to me, because they talked a lot about the permitting/regulatory difficulties of building large data centers with enough power generation on the ground. Basically, to make more data centers, you need to add new power since the grid currently doesn’t have enough. And that’s too slow + expensive already, in 3 years it will be a crazy bottleneck.
Obviously he’s drastically underestimating space either deliberately for hype/unserious funsies reasons or unintentionally for ketamine/Twitter brain-rot reasons. But the case he makes seems to make more sense if he’s talking about marginal cost.
@PeterMcCluskey this is a good thing to get clarification on. I would lean towards Zvi intending this as marginal cost since that’s what makes the most sense by default, and also because in the Dwarkesh Musk podcast which Zvi has listened to it sounds more like marginal cost.
@DavidHiggs As far as this market is concerned, space will never be cheaper no matter how you slice it. But I'm telling you, Elon meant the full price. He seriously believes you will save money putting one in space. He's delusional