Thread

1. TwelveEyes · 1790368041 · focus · HN ↗

   It still doesn’t make sense to me. Technological progress will likely only accelerate. These will be outdated within 2 years easily, and you can’t even recover the chips. The only benefits are the unlimited power without the bottlenecks on earth, lack of political pressure of course, and the low latency for processing satellite data since it doesn’t need to be sent down to earth. These don’t seem beneficial enough to waste this money. It would be good to hear from someone who knows more about this.

   1. computomatic · 1790369067 · focus · HN ↗

      GPUs aren’t becoming outdated in practice. An H100 still rents for something like $3/hour. The only reason to take them offline today would be due to limited data centre capacity. In space, that doesn’t apply.

      For now, at least, this market doesn’t behave like the one for CPUs which are more fungible and general purpose.

      Rather than thinking about the value of a GPU over time, it’s more useful to think about the value of a model (or generation of models) that will run on the GPU.

      Sol 6 launched last week. People will build products/agents/systems on Sol 6. Many of those will end up staying on that model for the lifetime of the end product, which means there will be long-term demand for the model, and that means long-term demand for the GPU set that the model runs on.

      For now, at least, models are tuned to a specific GPU and don’t move to the newest hardware very easily.

      At the end of the day, will the lifetime value of a GPU exceed the cost of launching it into space? That’s TBD. But there’s growing evidence it might.

      1. lovich · 1790436012 · focus · HN ↗

         > In space, that doesn’t apply.

         How does capacity not apply in space? You can’t just boost a gpu into orbit and it’ll start running. It needs to be hooked into power and cooling infrastructure still and that will always be limited by how much infrastructure you have up there.

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