As somebody from Hungary: the biggest impact of my mood was that this kind of thinking went back with the collapse of far right there to where it belongs: to a deep hole which is not in front of normal people. Average people suddenly don’t ask illogical questions or answer stupid things because there is nobody who would tell them that they need to think stupidly, there is nobody who tell them what stupid thing they should think that week. It’s marvelous when you get the proof that the whole “stupid thinking” is completely controlled from above.
It's not aimed at convincing you to support them, but to convince you everyone is lying and there is no meaningful difference between each position, so you stay apathetic.
I have a Claude Max plan I use for coding, but I also have a Grok Lite plan I use for web search type tasks (similar to Perplexity) because I like how the Grok harness handles searches and I don’t need a SOTA model for that use case. I’d never pay $30/mo for a full SuperGrok account but to me it’s worth the $10/mo for Lite as I was hitting limits on the free tier.
I’ve never noticed it to be particularly biased at least for anything I’ve been searching for on it. And on the other side, I’ve never noticed it to be particularly less censored or anything compared to other models either (also a claim I’ve heard a lot about Grok but I think because it is/was part of their marketing).
Its plausibly not in the API and only on the twitter bot, but I see no reason to trust x.ai given this history of obvious manipulation.
Once xAI training team “fix” their model, where will Anthropic be then?
It makes more sense to use this cluster for inference, since they can segment the cluster by GPU type and avoid GPU mixing. xAI doesn't have enough inference customers so it makes sense to monetize this to companies that need inference compute such as Anthropic or Cursor.
Apparently xAI will try building SOTA models on Colossus 2, which will be built on Blackwell GPUs only.
Anthropic has a lot of the market share and dominates the mind share, but each of Codex, Devin, Cursor, Claude, et al have significantly more market usage than they had 6 months ago and each are likely still growing very quickly based on publicly-reported information.
Until they finish training, it makes sense to rent the excess capacity.
But booking outrageous rental fees as fake AI revenue ahead of the SpaceX IPO apparently takes precedence.
This is all real revenue, real spend, real usage.
Hetzner just aren't at this scale. Not even close. If they wanted to get into this business - first, they're late. Second, it's at a scale of ~10x of their total lifetime datacenter buildout. Third, they'd need to change their business to being one that is debt fronted.
xAI have proven out that being able to deploy compute is a very viable business (and difficult to pull off)
At some point AI cynicism clashes with reality, it must be exhausting maintaining it.
[0] https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/mind-blowing-growth-is-about-to-...
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/spacex-ipo-anthropic-compute-fin...
Nowhere does the hypothetical state that Hetzner, an example for hardware rental, has the funding or the capabilities to execute the sarcastic example.
But ok, now hardware rentals have a P/E of 100 or more.
And yes, if hetzner built a massive AI hyper scale datacenter and rented it out for billions, with the expectation that they would keep building more, they would also see massive PE ratios because it’s expected that their revenue would be going up.
You poor misunderstood Bitcoin booster! Now you have to deal with AI critics! How about getting a real job?
He didn’t change his mind about anything. It’s just that he wants to prop up SpaceX’s IPO as much as he can. Plus if he hits various targets, he unlocks more shares for himself, I think.
He tried to steal the OpenAI charity, then started complaining about someone else stealing the OpenAI charity after he failed.
He attacks European democracies about free speech, but is a compliant little censor for Turkey, India and other non-European countries.
I'm not saying it's a likely scenario, but I genuinely believe a big percentage of AI investment revolves around that (or similar) scenarios.
(I'm not denying it could happen next year for all we know. But we simply don't know, and from what I hear from researchers the breadth of ideas we've tried are still small)
In the times before you also would rather have very smart people working together instead of one very smart dude alone even if he had an identical twin.
Or plateau as in it won't solve any Millennium Prize problems within the next decade?
And frankly as bad as Altman is from a: if AI is really going to disrupt humanity do I want this guy in charge? Elon is 10x worse. So why would the best and the brightest ever work for him?
You can kick off more model training runs and experiments than your competitors.
You can kick off a $1-2t IPO claiming you are going to capture a large portion of the largest TAM the world has ever seen.
A rental deal, even at a premium price, actually makes great sense for Anthropic. Rather than building themselves, they are de-risked by renting instead, and they don't own the depreciating asset. They've also compute-starved X.ai as a potential competitor as a marginal added bonus.
And I'm sure it's a bonus point for Musk that it goes to OpenAI's most relevant competitor
Outside of VC money, and circular financing, the only external money coming into ai are into open-ai, and anthropic via their subscriptions and APIs.
Wait, do people consider xAI a frontier AI lab?
OpenAI and Anthropic (and their investors!) are obviously also out on a limb here, both with deals in place to 10x their available compute (roughly 1GW -> 10GW) over next few years. Maybe these growth estimates are a bit more grounded, but they have all sorts of assumptions baked in. I still would not be surprised to see OpenAI self-implode, and to see Google and Microsoft as the eventual winners here.
Either way, I doubt he has any ‘real’ advantage in this game. It’s OpenAI and Anthropic, and then everyone else including the open weight models.
Make no mistake - Elon’s charging premium pricing because he has something Anthropic realllly needs. In exchange, he will get significant revenues added to the balance sheet along with the cursor team right around IPO. It’s very good business for Elon and SpaceX.
Everyone else trying to build data centres is really struggling (turns out building physical things is not as easy as writing code, who knew).
So Anthropic have the model but they're compute starved because everyone else they've signed agreements with still mostly have piles of dirt and the GPUs are still in Nvidia's warehouse somewhere.
It's a bit of a win-win: xAI's financial numbers will be massively improved by the revenue using otherwise useless data centre capacity, Anthropic get the compute they desperately need albeit probably paying through the nose for it
Note how the initial deal was only for the older Colossus #1 data center, and now after losing his lawsuit against OpenAI the Anthropic deal has been expanded to Colossus #2 also. Coincidence?
Edit: They did it with Colossus and now they're doing the exact same thing with Colossus2. https://www.selc.org/news/xai-built-an-illegal-power-plant-t...
But hey, number must go up, right?
This is a joke. Read it in a mocking tone.
Even if treating people as batteries doesn't make much sense as we are pretty terrible power plants, the message is clear and impactful. It is common for movies to oversimplify things, because they want to avoid having the viewer from being distracted from the main plot. It is tricky, as being too obviously wrong can breaks the immersion. I think the people = batteries analogy is a good compromise. Brains = computers, while technically more plausible would add a layer of complexity that could be a bit too much for a 2h action movie.
Undoubtedly, it will find cures to all cancers… The ARR and stock appreciation will be amazing. Except the cures will be found long after it has wiped out all humans.
Of course top of all that, even if human morals were perfect, it's still a dubious claim.
Greed is a societal illness.
A tremendous externality was leaded gas that was everywhere.
Some wild things happening with those, and infrasound. Colossus is shown 4 mins in
https://www.bearlythinking.com/p/andy-masley-doesnt-understa...
He has a full post response here: https://blog.andymasley.com/p/to-be-clear-i-do-understand-ho...
> Jordan is suspiciously lurching to the extremely high energy end of the light spectrum when we know that the low energy end (comparable to infrasound) doesn’t have negative impacts on us if we can’t detect its presence.
Masley spouts the falsifiable propaganda that any photon (light/emf) below ionizing radiation energy can only cause “heat” and can have no other possible harm effects.
Many science-minded people (though more accurately in this case, billiard-world materialists) have become quite militant defenders of this idea (ostensibly fighting off the hoardes of tinfoil hatters and quantum aquarians sensitive to 5g).
This point is very plausible military industrial propaganda. There were numerous studies with evidence (starting from the 60s) such as - non ionizing radiation (eg hv powerlines) might cause lots of cancer, and it’s weaponized (sub-thermal) usage can microwave the brains of enemy spies. THOSE studies have come out in declassified and leaked docs.
Now we have several plausible and serious theories of mechanism for low-f light disrupting biology that lean into quantum biology. While the iceberg of quantum biology understanding is still in its early decades, the mounting downstream evidence of health and medical issues are established public knowledge.
When you take a measurement of a sound, you are measuring both its pressure and its intensity, that is what is implied by a measurement in decibels. The measurement is taken from the point of the measurement device/listener in relation to the source/generator. If the measured value is potentially harmful, there is no such implication about needing to redirect additional energy to make it harmful, it's already been measured as potentially harmful at the point of measurement.
It's basically nonsense. My most charitable interpretation of his very first responsive argument is he's saying that a datacenter would need to intentionally direct energy towards increasing the intensity of its sound output to make Jordan's original measurements meaningful. That's neither how measurement works, nor how sound works, nor even how datacenters work. Things like sound and heat are BYPRODUCTS and not the point of the datacenter, both have an intensity, and that intensity is measurable, and any energy which is expended towards that intensity is energy that was wasted away from doing computations.
I stopped reading after this. I don't know if Masley is out of his element or just practicing motivated reasoning and thinks his readers are stupid. Either way, his rebuttal already failed on the first point.
So let's say you're a homebuilder, if I tell you I want a new home and I want to live there tomorrow, you can all of a sudden build it in a day, right?
Electricity use is skyrocketing for various reasons, these datacenters being one of them. There are a lot of countries struggling to keep up with demand. So incompetence? No, probably more like supply lagging demand.
Or ASML and Nvidia and all also are incompetent, because they didn't see demand coming....
They're basically attempting to game the system, politically and economically, to put as much of the cost on taxpayers and ratepayers as they can. This naturally slows things down.
> There are a lot of countries struggling to keep up with demand. So incompetence?
Mostly, yea. If the government gets out of the way there are plenty of people who would be happy to supply power in exchange for money. The homebuilding analogy is good because homebuilding in the US often has the same issues that plague the electricity market. There's no reason it should take years to build homes in many parts of this country, but it does.
We don't need the government to fix it by expanding power grids from the top down, we need free markets allowing competition.
I live about 18 miles downwind of the new Colossus sites, the airport, and lots of truck logistics sites, and a large refinery.
I definitely will be getting 2x exposure to ozone and particulates from both Colossi when they are running full bore. Plus an extra dose of ultrafine particulate with my morning fresh air.
Yes, wouldn’t it be nice to be in Nashville instead with HCA, Oracle, many insurance and financial institutions, and the joy of country music.
As an avid Opus user I am in an ethical Nimby bind. We do need almost any investments we can get in Shelby County TN. I’ll take Anthropic in preference to Grok NOx. And it will be my NOx.
i would expect close to no 100LL burning planes use MEM.
Airplanes by virtue of their mode of operation stay out of the unhappy regime most of the time. Also, engines at/near idle produde orders of magnitude less emissions. Those aeroderivative generators are running at full capacity 24/7.
Dumping exhaust at ground level continuously is probably much worse than the airport. Even if it's a FedEx world hub.
It's the same datacenter? Ran by the same people?
If you shoot someone in the face, it will produce a meaningful increase in local/regional murder, but represent a rounding error nationally and globally.
Come on, stop with the desperate false equivalencies.
Dario has been glorified unnecessarily. He's just like all the other people in the space: not good, not bad.
And keep in mind that when Dario was opposing AI usage by the US State he wasn't really opposing, he was just saying "not yet".
That's the exact reason we will never go fully solar (or wind) unless an insanely impressive battery breakthrough makes storage effectively free while using only common, renewable components rather than rare earths.
Solar, wind, etc are excellent parts of an energy system, but its nearly impossible to cover base load at scale with generation that may only run for 0-5 hours a day.
edit: typo
1. https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-how-solar-panels-and-...
2. https://www.fastcompany.com/91500104/google-minnesota-data-c...
That still doesn't avoid the more fundamental math of having to store such massive amounts of energy though, even if you skip batteries and pump water to retention ponds uphill.
Even for small scale residential, the recommendation is to store 3 days worth of average usage to handle stretches of cloudy days and to have a generator for the times when that still doesn't cut it. You also need enough solar that 4-6 hours of generation can fill those batteries back up after a stretch of cloudy days.
You also have to contend with frequency issues. This is what took down Spain's grid, they had turned on a ton of solar at the time - with many gas plants offline a seemingly small dip below 60Hz really wrecks much of the system when it wasn't designed to handle those swings and triggers multiple safety mechanisms.
The "inertia" issues already have solutions being used in production (in Australia, for example).
The inertia problem you mention wasn't solved in Spain though, and whether it can be solved or already is elsewhere is irrelevant here.
> The new plant in Minnesota will be big enough to deliver 300 megawatts of power and store an enormous 30 gigawatt-hours of energy, making it the largest battery by capacity that’s been announced so far. By comparison, that’s more storage than all of the battery projects built in the U.S. in 2024 added together.
If I'm doing the math right, Minnesota used 65.7 TWh of power last year so to store 3 days worth of power just for that one city we would need a battery 18x larger than the one mentioned here.
I can't imagine we could ever scale such storage capacity for all energy use, let alone all the wind and solar required to fill it.
“Sorry, we have to shut down your database because it’s been overcast for the last two days”
Now, they could have a mix, of course, but just running on solar and batteries at that power is not realistic.
I fully expect "space AI" to be about as realistic as the flying cars and hover boards we've been promised since televisions were black and white.
I'm not sold that a data center in space is even possible unless and until we develop a drastically different solution for heat management.
Also possible he sees infra as the future of xAI if he really believes in the value of space compute.
Hard to see this any of this as anything other than a bearish sign for Grok though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Line,_Saudi_Arabia
Musk and MBS should hold hands.
We can call it the Peta(Principle)Line!
Intel and TSMC are not what they are today just because they buy a very expensive EUV Machine from ASML but because they have the knowledge and infrastructure to even use these machines.
xAI is bleeding money and this compute deal with Anthropic will pay for all of xAI's capex ($25 billion) in 2 years.
This is a confusing framing; you pay down capex with profit not revenue, and there is presumably a high opex cost.
So you are still covering all of that.
That does not seem probable to me, other than for the initial build-out.
minus maintenance and energy cost.
That ship has sailed, we're in the Age of Cults. If you're a believer you're probably also invested in his companies, so your mind is doubly-clouded.
Further I think external agents are controlling their mind.
...the value of having others buy the idea of space computing. I don't think he himself believes in what he says.
* mass produced EVs * Neural links to brain * reusable rockets * more efficient tunnel digging
Dude has a pretty good record of taking stuff in R&D and making pretty real products and/or companies. Can you name someone better?
Neuralink is just another medical device company right now. The things it is succeeding at aren't the crazy sci-fi Elon "telepathy" vision at all, and there are other BCI companies.
Boring Company is quite stagnant and I would say what they achieved is very underwhelming. The original framing was that it would revolutionize the costs of subway and high speed rail tunnels and it has not achieved that at all. The things it currently does are nothing like the vision Musk was selling in 2017, much of the original concept was shelved.
Robotaxi is wildly off schedule and his timelines that he puts out for it have been non-stop over optimistic and wrong. This may catch up eventually, but it's currently not at the point that Musk was already claiming it was at 10 years ago.
I'd list as another big flop of the last 10 years the Tesla Solar Roof.
Also, I think by far the biggest Musk reality mismatch is the story he pushes regarding Optimus vs what anyone has actually seen of that product. That mismatch is absolutely wild. Anyone who believes the things he says about timelines for it needs to get a grip.
His own product is competing against anthropic.
Heard anybody remotely competent about space talk the topic? It's pretty much a literal laugh every time.
Out-of-regulatory-reach is what they'll actually be selling. It can be on earth, it just has to be sufficiently hidden such that you can claim that it's in space.
That conversation goes like this:
US: Stop doing that thing with your data center
X: It's in space, you can't tell us what to do
US: Yes we can
X: <Say OK> or <Go to jail>
I think compute in space suffers less from being "impossible" and more from being "impractical". It is plenty easy to put compute in space. It is just still silly expensive and by the time your equipment makes up the cost of putting it in space, it will be well out of date.
The power budget of a starlink v2 mini satellite is estimated at around 20kW based on the known solar panel size. That also matches what a satellite of that size would roughly dissipate without dedicated radiators, using just some heat pipes to spread the heat evenly over the satellite's surface. There is nothing fundamentally preventing you from taking the same satellite design, remove most of the comms payload and instead put 15kW of GPUs there. Or about 10 GB200 including the CPUs, networking, etc that you need along with the GPUs
Now, do the economics work out for $300k worth of compute for each satellite, in an environment where maintenance is impossible and degradation will be higher than on the ground? Probably not right now, but in a couple years they might
You’re making some decent points here, but you’re either forgetting or ignoring the major thing that people usually neglect to mention when they want to make a case for this (crazy) idea — weight. Unless SpaceX is going to completely redesign hardware such that it is optimized entirely for its mass, it requires many (many) launches to even get a small set of racks into space. I don’t normally get up in arms about the CO2 emissions of data centers, I think there is offsetting value created by their use, but I would absolutely protest trying to put data centers in space and do my best to shut down the hundreds, if not thousands of launches it would take to achieve even a tiny fraction of an AI data center.
Furthermore, xAI's colossus supercomputer is specced at 250MW. And this seems to be a number that'll just increase over the coming years with new bigger DCs.
To match this level of performance they will have to launch what, ~15k satellites _per_ equivalent datacentre?
Regarding cooling: you can't just cover the outer surface with pipes. You cant't dissipate the heat, you need to _radiate_ it away. You need to point that surface to the deep dark cold of space. If you point it to the sun, you will heat your satellite. Think a massive "reverse solar panel" that works with infrared. You need surface area, and loads of it.
I'm not saying this is impossible. Obviously elon will prove us all wrong because he's stubborn like that. But there is no way this will ever be economically viable when competing with terrestrial based systems.
The actual Starlink V2 Mini is has estimates for solar generation that range up to 35kW. We need a bit more, but not much more.
My numbers are a bit optimistic, but they are in the right order of magnitude. Power and cooling are very achievable in the area of putting one server on one satellite. It's the "putting one DC on one mega satellite" ideas that run into feasability issues, and for inference those aren't needed. The economics are the bigger issue, and launch costs are only moving in one direction
I'm pretty sure we'll see this within the next 5 years.
But deploying a megawatt scale DC in space? And then doing that multiple times a year?? I can't see how this is the only solution to this problem. I can't see how that will be the de-facto way of deploying DCs. Not for the next 100 years or more.
Even then, space is still a harder place to put a satellite than any rural area on the planet.
The fact that elon's colossus data centre needs to burn jet fuel on site for power tells you everything you need to know about the viability of a solar powered space based solution.
And that’s before you get past the cost of actually putting the shit up there instead of just driving or shipping by rail.
It’s just more looney tunes delusion from a guy who is just talking out his ass about shit he thinks is cool, like the cyber truck was.
More promising is that cursor is training a model using it.
Or is there something fundamental in the way these models get deployed (encryption or something or than legal contracts?) at this scale that prohibits the owners of the infra from gaining this level of insight / access?
The contract can stipulate a penalty at a high enough amount to discourage this behavior.
2) Output from models & intra-datacenter communications can be encrypted if customers truly cared.
3) There is no reason do this, because there are far better ways to exfiltrate data from Anthropic models. Chinese companies are already doing this at an industrial scale where they are reselling Claude tokens for 10-20% of the cost while retaining the data to train their own models. https://www.chinatalk.media/p/how-to-buy-cheap-claude-tokens...
If we look at Deepseek V4-pro, created by Deepseek who Anthropic formally accused of harvesting Claude tokens at scale, it performs the same as Claude did 6 months prior.
1. OpenRouter is based in New York, and offers a 1% discount when users enable logging of their inputs/outputs; it doesn't take a genius to figure out why they might incentivize that
Thanks for the chuckle. ;)
I guess as a European I want the legal system to be robust in terms of protecting the citizen’s interests against corporations. I can see how you can also want robustness in terms of protecting corporate interests against citizens, so, yes, the statement remains technically true in terms of robustness.
In terms of justice, again as a European, I think of Justitia, the Roman Godess, who judges based on “ideals of truth, fairness, honesty and justice“, “applied without regard to wealth, power, or other status”, evaluating “the goodness of the heart”. I don’t see these values represented much in the US so-called “justice” system.
Both aspects sufficiently documented for example over and over again in Matt Levine’s financial reporting.
I think you missed the part where Anthropic stopped displaying their thinking tokens over the past few months, and instead now provides “summarized thinking”, letting Haiku summarize Opus’ thoughts.
So it is now much more difficult (impossible?) to distill the models.
I also think you over-estimate how well the legal systems works in the US nowadays, and under-estimate just how much power Elon has in the government.
In Feb Anthropic called out three Chinese labs for "distillation attacks", but a lab missing in their post actually had most Claude generated tokens among all Chinese labs in their midtrain data :p
Deepseek kept its pace of improvement nonetheless.
If Elon REALLY wanted to do anything like that he would be better off poaching talent from competitors, less legal hell to go through.
I hear that it is very much up there in _one_ domain. You know the one.
It's generally far easier to install spying software under a computer under your control than to detect it.
How do you trust space infra? You can't show up and audit some kind of airgap. Whatever encryption keys you have are likely accessible in memory sometime.
Disclosure: former (small) SX investor.
SpaceX S-1
Grok could easily be powered by Claude in just a few weeks engineering time.
I’d hoped Anthropic would steer clear of blatantly unethical practices but here they go in bed with that guy and his horribly damaging data center.
Europe needs to focus more on Europe and less US politics.
Demark provides almost no financial support to Greenland, and can't defend it. It will prove to be very strategically important as the ice caps melt.
Russia invaded Ukraine, and Demark lets russia use the Danish straights to transport oil despite the US asking them to not allow them entry. Demark has no way to protect it's own straits, how is it suppose to stop an invasion of Greenland from russia? How is it supposed to impose order and control the north artic if it can't even protect it's own straights?
These are very real security concerns from then US that a monarch can't address.
To the extent both are true, it’s non trivial to have large grid connections in the US these days or even gas pipeline connections hooked up to generators around a datacenter. Those assets are valuable.
Even distillation would be obvious.
And I wouldn't be surprised Anthropic is running the smaller inference models, keeping the base large model in machines they fully control/own.
Put another way - they could maybe try to do this. But it would be worth literally nothing compared to the actual benefits to SX of this deal. And add an immense amount of risk. There’s much more clever and interesting things to do.
Otherwise, OpenAI/Anthropic would never use external clouds since the weights are some of the most valuable assets in the world.
Which means that getting the full weights out isn't even an "if" - it's "how much effort". The encryption wouldn't do much more than a gentleman's agreement would.
The only real move for Anthropic there is to outline contract penalties for letting weights get leaked, and never give less trusted external inference providers access to cutting edge system weights.
Exposure is limited either way. Opus 4.7 weights are a deprecating asset - it's bleeding edge today, very valuable now, but it'll lose a lot of its value the moment Opus 5.0 drops.
Do you think OpenAI would send CoreWeave their GPT 5.5 Pro weights if an admin employee at CoreWeave can access the full weights unencrypted? Of course not.
Like I said: it's a gentleman's agreement. If Musk said "I want Opus 4.7 weights", and those weights were on Colossus 1 hardware, he'd have those weights on his desktop, unencrypted, within a couple of weeks.
There's also the side channel line, because having inference on your hardware typically allows you to do things like snoop into KV cache and peek at per-layer, or even per-expert, residuals. Which allows for some very advanced distillation attacks. Might be easier/more deniable to pull that off than dumping full weights, in some circumstances.
What I suggested is to steal the (possibly intermediate) weight in between by sniffing the network communication bus, which means MITM for getting the exact values. Or unless it turns out OpenAI or Anthropic leveraged homomorphic encryption, or I'm not certain how is Anthropic would safely allow Mythos to run on AWS without their control.
They make good models, at times SotA (at least if you don't need coding, their last good coding model was six months ago), with lower safeguards than either Anthropic or OpenAI, and they still fail to capture meaningful market share or mind share. The name Grok is tainted by the twitter bot of the same name operated by xAI/X. Being owned by Musk lets the company appear unstable and untrustworthy in the minds of many. Their marketing game is just bad all around. They struggle to retain top talent.
Maybe their next model will be great. I doubt it will matter. I doubt xAI siphoning off Anthropic models and distilling that would matter. Model performance is not the main factor dragging down xAI
they have GPUs so yes
SpaceX expects to complete its $60 billion acquisition of AI coding startup Cursor roughly 30 days after it begins trading publicly, according to Bloomberg.
Cursor's Composer 2 model was built on Kimi K2.5, who were in turn accused of 'distillation' attacks by Anthropic.
Anthropic now relies on SpaceX for compute demands.
xAI gets the cashflow and makes spaceX bottom line more appealing. But that guy Musk hardly makes deals that favor other companies over his, so what am i missing?