Elon Musk has a new vision this week. Instead of Mars, he’s building a base on the moon. He needs the “self-sustaining” base to launch satellites. Last week the satellites were the datacentres in space that were his (old) new vision.
Also last week, he merged SpaceX with the loss-making xAI, which itself “acquired” the loss-making X (formerly Twitter). That came in the same week the European Commission raided the offices of #WhatWasOnceTwitter over its lack of content moderation.
The latest blatant disregard of privacy came this year, when xAI’s Grok chatbot debuted a new feature that allowed anyone to create sexualised images of people without their consent. It’s as horrendous and invasive as it sounds.
Instead of disabling it, Twitter made it a paid-for feature and let the blue-ticked crowd carry on putting children in bikinis. In all, about 3-million such images were created, of which 23,000 were of children. This week two of the co-founders of xAI quit amid the latest scandal to engulf the world’s richest man. It goes on and on.
I yearn for the days when Musk’s outlandish moonshots where the ideas of a brilliant, entrepreneurial genius. Now they sound like he thought them up on ketamine, which he reportedly takes in such proportions it has given him incontinence, a known symptom of overuse.
A base on the moon making satellites for low-earth orbit that will be an enormous data centre in space sounds like the plot of a science fiction novel, of which Musk is a big fan.
Before he lost the plot and began making Nazi salutes, Musk named the robot barges onto which his SpaceX rockets landed after spaceships from Iain M Bank’s excellent Culture scifi novels. That was “peak geek” and I loved that wonderful homage to Banks, who I met 25 years ago at a book signing. As an aside, Banks was an outrageously funny speaker.
Musk was in full hyperbolic mode in his pie-in-the-sky memo to SpaceX staff last week about the merger with xAI.
“This cost-efficiency alone will enable innovative companies to forge ahead in training their AI models and processing data at unprecedented speeds and scales, accelerating breakthroughs in our understanding of physics and invention of technologies that benefit humanity,” he wrote.
Of course, this will benefit his shareholders long before the rest of us sees any such advantages. Musk argued “current advances in AI are dependent on large terrestrial data centres, which require immense amounts of power and cooling. Global electricity demand for AI simply cannot be met with terrestrial solutions, even in the near term, without imposing hardship on communities and the environment”.
TechCrunch points out the irony, with xAI “accused of imposing some of that hardship” on the communities near its data centres in Memphis, Tennessee. But if you look at the numbers the real reason is because xAI is losing money at $1bn a month, according to Bloomberg. Meanwhile, the tie-up inflates SpaceX’s potential IPO value from the $800bn it was estimated at in December to over the $1,25-trillion mark.
AI firms, led by OpenAI, are spending hundreds of billions a year on rolling out the data centres that are needed for the intense computing power — frustratingly reduced to the word “compute” to make it sound more impressive. Musk must know cash-rich AI investors will want to get in on the action and will now get a big upside in the SpaceX listing.
After the inevitable IPO — Musk has taken over Steve Jobs’ famous “reality distortion field” so it will be oversubscribed and will fuel his already out-of-control egomania — there is a lot of physics in the way of data centres in space. The first big problem is the cost. Google argued in a paper last year it will be viable if the industry can reduce its price to $200/kg.
The next big problem — insurmountable, I hasten to add — is the Nvidia processors that power the data centres need to be replaced every few years. It’s harder to do that in space, obviously.
This supposedly is where Moonbase Alpha, as Musk is calling it, comes into its own. Perhaps as well as build satellites it can replace the chips. Except the moon is a three-day callout trip away. That means you’d have to get a technician into space to change the chips (using a SpaceX rocket) but that ain’t going to be a cheap exercise either.
Meanwhile, the whole satellite needs to be protected from the fierce radiation our atmosphere gives us as part of a global service-level agreement — for free. For all the arguments about free space and free power (from solar) there are as many counter-arguments for common sense and logic against an expensive data centre in space hyperbolic dreams.
I’m conflicted about Musk and his unconscionable actions in feeding USAid into the “woodchipper” versus the amazing potential of another of his companies, Starlink. I earnestly believe it is a game changer for connectivity in rural areas. I know many farmers, Joburg semigraters and retirees who are desperate for its fibre-like speeds and reliability.
But think of the schools, clinics, hospitals, police stations and community halls that can get online and all the benefits of that. Online health records, case dockets uploaded digitally so they can’t be “lost” and Wi-Fi for kids to do their homework.
That would be a wonderful, easily attainable game changer right here on earth.
• Shapshak is editor-in-chief of Stuff.co.za.
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