This makes me genuinely sad. SpaceX was the one thing of his that Elon has largely avoided screwing up. Imho, this is in large part due to Gwynne Shotwell. She seems to have the personality (not to mention, personal wealth) to kick Elon in the head when he tries to mess things up.
What’s happening now is nothing more than a transparent effort to couple the AI hype-wagon to SpaceX in order to drive the valuation higher in the minds of investors who still think that LLMs will completely transform society.
I’ll be thrilled if the rocket folks can avoid being distracted by this nonsense, but I’m not optimistic.
I’ve been following SpaceX since something like the 2nd Falcon 1 launch and this is the worst thing I’ve seen happen. Sad times.
Not that kind of bus. A “satellite bus” is more of a standardized platform onto which mission-specific payloads are integrated. Saves having to design an entire spacecraft from scratch and gives you a known-good set of functionality.
So, a set of standard software RPCs (remote procedure calls) and APIs (application programming interfaces) and not another electrical signalling standard. Got it.
Thanks for the correction.
So, I guess the next question is what are you folks actually using at the electrical signalling level to talk? (If you are not allowed to say, I understand.)
Nothing about this struck me as a sign that money wasn’t well-invested. From the headline, I was picturing “we raised and then I blew it in Vegas”.
Nothing wrong with admitting to uncertainty and insecurity. I mean, there are two types of people — those who suffer doubt sometimes, and those who don’t admit it. Give me the first kind any time.
Notice as well that no mention of efficiency was made. Perhaps I missed it, but I’m somewhat familiar with power generation, and usually efficiency is front and center.
They already do that. They invest the endowment, and right now it exists as a firewall to cover operations in the event that their search licensing revenue becomes unstable. The annual growth of the endowment is not nothing, but it's also nowhere near enough to fund their browser development on a yearly basis.
And while I don't love the dabbling in ad tech, and I do think there's been confusion around the user interface, I think by far the most unfair smear Mozilla has suffered is to claim they haven't been focusing on the core browser. Every year they're producing major internal engine overhauls that deliver important gains to everything from WebGPU to spidermonkey, to their full overhaul of the mobile browser, to Fission/Site Isolation work.
Since their Quantum project, which overhauled the browser practically from top to bottom in 2017 and delivered the stability and performance gains that everyone was asking for, they've done the equivalent of one "quantum unit" of work on other areas in the browser on pretty much an unbroken chain from then until now. It just doesn't get doesn't mentioned in headlines.
The typical 1 gigawatt rating for a nuclear power reactor is measuring electrical output. Given the various inefficiencies, the actual reactor output (as heat) is something like 3x that amount. Whereas a research reactor will be quoted as thermal output.
That to say, a typical commercial reactor might be 30x the power of a 100 MW research device.
What’s happening now is nothing more than a transparent effort to couple the AI hype-wagon to SpaceX in order to drive the valuation higher in the minds of investors who still think that LLMs will completely transform society.
I’ll be thrilled if the rocket folks can avoid being distracted by this nonsense, but I’m not optimistic.
I’ve been following SpaceX since something like the 2nd Falcon 1 launch and this is the worst thing I’ve seen happen. Sad times.
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