Elon Musks Insane TERAFAB: AI Compute Tesla Bots in Space (AI NEWS)

It sounds nuts, but you know, if you’ve got an AI robotics economy that is anywhere close to a million times the size of the current earth economy, literally any need you possibly want can be met. If you can think of it, you can have it. So I think Ian Banks in his culture books has it pretty much right where there actually isn’t money in the future and there’s abundance for everyone. If you can think of it, you can have it. That’s it. Which means anyone could have a trip to Saturn. There won’t be, you know, just a few people.

If you want it, you can have it. This looks a bit like the opening an idiocracy with the Mike Judge unlocking an age of amazing abundance. So yeah, obviously the elements of that are sustainable energy, space travel and AI and robotics that bring amazing abundance to everyone. So the first question here is why send AI into space in the first place? So as soon as the cost to orbit drops to a low number, it immediately makes extremely compelling sense to put AI in space. It becomes a no-brainer, basically. As you go to space, you get increased economies of scale and things get easier over time, whereas as you try to put more and more power on the ground, you run out of space.

And here’s a look at the bigger picture, starting with the Tesla optimus for labor. So let’s give you sort of just a sense of scale. We’ve got optimus there, optimus for scale. And optimus is about 5.11. So it gives you sense of the size of the Starship V3 rocket. Starship V4 will be much longer, actually. The Starship V4 will make Starship V3 look kind of short. So we’ll expand with Starship V3 to 200 tons of payload to orbit. Next, Elon Musk explains what this payload is and how it relates to the terafab with a jaw-dropping projection of what’s coming.

So broadly speaking, we expect to make two kinds of chips. One will be optimized for edge inference. So that’ll be used primarily in optimus and in the cars, but especially in optimus, because I expect the humanoid robots to be made 10 to 100 times more than the volume of cars. So, you know, if vehicle production is about 100 million vehicles a year, and I expect humanoid robot production to be somewhere between a billion and 10 billion units a year. And we’re starting off with an advanced technology fab here in Austin. So in the advanced technology fab, we will have all of the equipment necessary to make a chip of any kind, logical memory.

And we will also have all of the equipment necessary to make the lithography masks. Then he talks about pushing the envelope of what’s possible both in compute and in physics. So in order to get to the terawatt of compute per year, you need about 10 million tons to orbit per year and at 100 kilowatts per ton. So we’re confident this is feasible, like no new physics or impossible things are required to get there. So I’m confident actually that SpaceX will get to 10 million tons to orbit per year. And then we need a high power chip that is designed for space, that takes into account the more difficult environment in space where you’ve got high power, you’ve got high energy ions, photons, you’ve got electron buildup, it’s a hostile environment in space.

So you want to design the chip, you want to optimize it for space. And you also want to generally run it a little hotter than you would normally run a chip on Earth to minimize the radiator mass. So there are just a bunch of constraints that you design something differently in space than you would on the ground. And for the space compute, my guess is that is the vast majority of the compute, because you’re power constrained on Earth. So I think it’s probably 100 to 200 gigawatts a year of terrestrial chips, and probably on the order of a terawatt of chips in space.

But how close is this future? And what are the implications for AI and humans? So I actually think that the cost of AI and deploying AI in space will drop below the cost of terrestrial AI much sooner than most people expect. I think it may be only two or three years before it is actually lower cost to send AI chips to space than it is on the ground. Because in space, you don’t need much in the way of batteries because of it’s always sunny. And the solar power, you’re going to get at least five or more times the solar power you get in space versus the ground.

And here’s where it starts to sound like sci fi, because this is what some of these billions of humanoids will be employed to build out in space. You know, you get there by having an electromagnetic mass driver on the moon with robots with optimi, and obviously lots of humans. And with that you can send a petawatt, you can create a petawatt compute and send that to deep space. Because on the moon, moon has no atmosphere and has one sixth earth gravity. So you can you don’t need rockets on the moon, you can literally accelerate it to escape velocity from the surface.

And that dramatically drops the costs once again, of harnessing power and and labels you to go 1000 times bigger than a terawatt. And then, yeah, you expand beyond that to the planets to the other stars and create the most exciting possible future than that I can imagine. Anyways, like and subscribe and check out this video for the latest in AI and robotics news. [tr:trw].