SpaceX buys xAI, Elon Musk promises AI in space

Elon Musk's SpaceX has just bought Elon Musk's xAI (which owns the Grok chatbot and the X social network previously known as Twitter), in a stock-only reshuffling of Elon Musk's companies that aren't Tesla.

Unfortunately, the opportunity to rename the combined entity SpaceXai hasn't been taken advantage of, at least not yet. Musk says the deal was done "to form the most ambitious, vertically-integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth, with AI, rockets, space-based internet, direct-to-mobile device communications and the world's foremost real-time information and free speech platform".

Musk promises we'll have "space-based AI" in the future, "a million satellites that operate as orbital data centers", and humanity will become a multi-planetary Kardashev II-level civilization, "one that can harness the Sun's full power while supporting AI-driven applications". For all of this, SpaceX's Starship will (at some undefined point in the future) carry out launches every hour with a payload of 200 tons per flight, delivering "millions of tons to orbit and beyond per year".

Musk also says that "within 2 to 3 years, the lowest cost way to generate AI compute will be in space". Or so he hopes, since he pretty much would have a monopoly on that. Of course none of this should be taken very seriously, as with Musk most of what he says aims to pump up the share value of his companies, and there's no reason for any of this to be an exception. We'll even spare you the "factories on the moon" part of the press release - if you're into sci-fi, head on over to the Source below to be entertained.

Source