Suppose that Elon wanted to put 1 GW of solar in orbit and used that GW to power GPUs. What would the cost be? Let's assume that SpaceX can get starship to land both stages and SpaceX can put 100 tones in orbit for $20 million in one launch.
All figures below are WAG - wild ass guesses.
The cost of all the engineering research needed put a GW data center in orbit = ???? = $30B ???"
10,000 tons of Solar Cells - cost $500 million - needs 100 launches = $2B
20,000 tons of Radiators - cost $20B - needs 200 launches = $4B
1.5 million GPUs which weighs 2,000 tons - cost $60B - needs 20 launches = $200M
So, the total cost is around 30 + 3 + 20 + 4 + 60 = $120 Billion (approximately). If you build an AI data center on Earth, most of the cost is the cost of the GPUs. In space, the GPUs are about half the cost. I did not include the cost of communications bandwidth. That might be hard and expensive. On the other hand, "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes [or hard drives] hurtling down the highway." (Replace station wagon with a starship.)
IMHO, the "Best" benchmark which has images as part of its input is MMMU (https://mmmu-benchmark.github.io).
Top 5 on MMMU: GPT4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Gemini 1.5 Pro, Claude 3 Opus, and Gemini 1.0 Ultra.
Best Chinese Model is Qwen-2.5-VL-72B which is about 10th.
IMHO, the "Best" text based benchmarks are MMLU and ARC
Top 5 MMLU: GPT-5, GPT-4.1, Claude Opus 4.1, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and Llama 3.1 405B.
Best Chinese Model: DeepSeek-R1
Top 5 ARC: Llama 3.1 405B, Claude 3 Opus, Claude 3.5 / 4.5, AI21 Labs, Meta / Mixed models.
Chinese Model: No data found.
It's hard to know what to put in a science book that would not be revised in 1000 years. You can put any math theorem that has been verified by Lean which includes 95% of undergraduate math. Almost everything else is less certain. I guess that you can put in Newtonian mechanics with the caveat that it is very accurate only for objects with mass between 1 nanogram and one sextillion kilograms moving at less than 0.1% of the speed of light. You could put in many chemical reactions and the periodic table up to atomic number 103(Lawrencium) and maybe add factual information for atoms with atomic number between 104(Rutherfordium) and 113(Nihonium).
It would be interesting to try to figure out which scientific "facts" will still be considered true in 1000 years.
GPT Summary with some added by me.
When Einstein completed his studies at the Swiss Federal Polytechnic in Zürich in 1900, he hoped to enter academia but faced obstacles largely of his own making. He preferred learning independently rather than attending lectures, which gave him a reputation for disregarding authority, and some professors saw him as disrespectful. He also clashed openly with Heinrich Weber, a senior professor who had significant influence over academic hiring. Because of this conflict, Weber refused to write recommendation letters for him—an essential requirement in European academic circles at the time. Without such support, Einstein could not obtain the typical entry-level academic positions, such as research or teaching assistantships. Compounding this, his early doctoral work progressed slowly, and his first dissertation attempt was rejected; he did not receive his Ph.D. until 1905, after already working at the Swiss Patent Office. As a result, he ended up there rather than in a university post. 1905 was the year that he published four famous papers on the Photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, Special Relativity, and E=mc^2.
(I do not have a degree in physics! I took about 7 courses in physics in college.)
You're looking at this logically. Stop that.
LOL
The cost of development for the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy were incredibly low and they are currently the cheapest way to get cargo into orbit. So, for these two programs, SpaceX has been cheaper than any government run program.
Flacon 9 : $2600/kg Falcon Heavy : $1500/kg Long March 5 : $2800/kg Everyone else : $4000+/kg
The Dragon space craft and the Falcon 9 together received about $400 million in tax payer money to design. The total cost of development for the Falcon 9 was around $400 million. SpaceX spent an additional 100 to 200 million dollars to develop the Falcon Heavy. For comparison, the Starliner space craft cost the US tax payers about $5 billion. The US tax payer paid around $25 billion to develop the SLS. The space shuttle cost about $30 billion to develop in today's dollars. The Saturn V cost about $50 billion to develop in today's dollars. The SLS and Saturn V could take over 100 tons to orbit. The Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy can take about 22 tons and 63 tons to orbit. If successful, the Starship will deliver 100 to 150 tons while recovering both stages or 200 tons to LEO without recovery.
The cost of development for the starship first and second stage is about $5 billion so far. Elon is hoping the total cost will be $10 billion. If SpaceX can get the lower stage of Starship to land softly 95% of the time and the second stage is able to deploy satellites without blowing up, then the cost to LEO for Starship will be on the order of $1100/kg. If SpaceX can get both stages to land softly, then the cost to LEO will be less than $100/kg, a factor of 11 reduction! (Elon has stated that SpaceX may be able to reduce the cost to LEO to $20/kg if Starship is able to recover both stages.)
In summary, so far, SpaceX had been much better than anyone else at developing the best rockets on earth (best both due to reliability and cost per kg to orbit) more cheaply than any other rocket development program.
I guess the silly metric that we look at the most is GDP/capita. I looked at the Wikipedia IMF nominal GDP per capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and that shows that between 1980 and 2020, the US, Germany, UK, Italy, and France grew by 410%, 326%, 276%, 275%, and 211% respectively (the Berlin wall fell in 1989, so I am suspicious of the cited GDP per capita in Germany in 1980.) If we adjust for inflation using the CPI, we get a real growth of 56%, 29% 14% 14% and -5% respectively. So, by that metric, the US has done relatively well compared to Europe. I think the PPP figures (purchase power parity) is similar. I did not look at other date ranges.
Another perhaps less silly metric would be the growth in median income after taxes after paying for health care and adjusting for PPP. The closest I could get for that was median disposable income which does not include health care as far as I can tell. I asked GPT to do the computation and it got 133%, 80%, 68%, 49%, and 76% respectively for the same countries. Again the US did the best by that imperfect metric. I suspect that if we included health care costs, the US would not do as well. (See https://www.oecd.org/en/public...)
So, it seems to me that the quality of life in Europe may be better because of better health care and less worry about retirement. On the other hand, over the last 40 years, the US seems to be a bit more innovative and there is more opportunity to become very rich in the US. Demographic changes will hit Europe harder over the next 40 years if the fertility rates do not change a lot. On the other hand, who knows how AI will change things.
If God is perfect, why did He create discontinuous functions?
