🚀Pourquoi SpaceX se recentre sur la lune et l’IA : all you need to know ; et autres news du futur

Why AI is no longer a bubble

Bonjour,

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Je m’appelle Thomas, plus d’infos sur moi en cliquant ici.

🎙️ Mes derniers podcasts

• Poutine et la guerre à l’Europe : le scénario catastrophe du front atlantique

  • Entretien exceptionnel (Spotify, Apple, Youtube) avec Stéphane Audrand, consultant indépendant en risques internationaux, historien et officier de réserve dans la Marine. Il est l’auteur remarqué de l’article “Poutine et la guerre à l’Europe : le scénario du front atlantique” publié dans le Grand Continent.

• Vivons-nous dans une simulation ? (Youtube)

• 🌍Entretien exclusif avec Philippe Bihouix, co-auteur de la BD à succès “Ressources : Un défi pour l’humanité” (Youtube, Spotify, Apple)

Et voici donc ma toute dernière sélection !

• Wow : Google Project Genie lets you create interactive worlds from a photo or prompt (watch the demo video)

  • They’re not technically 3D worlds, though. World models like Genie 3 create a video that responds to your control inputs, allowing you to explore the simulation as if it were a real virtual world.

  • C’est d’ailleurs le secret derrière l’entraînement intensif des voitures autonomes Waymo (source)

  • “By simulating the “impossible”, we proactively prepare the Waymo Driver for some of the most rare and complex scenarios—from tornadoes to planes landing on freeways—long before it encounters them in the real world.”

• On Waymo: Riding in a Waymo is now, on average, 13% more expensive than riding in an Uber and 27% more expensive than riding in a Lyft,

  • down from a 30% to 40% premium for Waymo rides last April (source)

• Tesla autonomy for real? (by Ben Evans)

  • Tesla’s ‘robot taxi’ pilot in Austin, a town in Texas, started doing rides without a human safety driver sitting in the car.

  • Yes, Waymo has been doing this in 2023, but it also needs tens of thousands of dollars of sensors where Tesla is only using cameras.

  • Tesla’s market cap today is about $1.6tr, but most auto analysts value the actual car business at no more than $200bn or so, and that’s even though it’s shrinking in the face of tired models, Chinese competition, and the CEO’s enthusiastic endorsement of white supremacists. (Yes, really. Don’t look away.)

  • All the rest depends on solar (remember that?), robot taxi services, and now robots. This company was always about the promise, but that used to be the promise of the next car - now it’s the promise of things beyond cars, as Tesla itself no longer has an edge.

• The social network where only bots can post (by tech analyst Ben Evans)

  • First, OpenClaw: it was almost the only topic in Silicon Valley last week. It’s a bundle of open-source software that lets you run a personal assistant on your Mac that calls, runs, and controls all sorts of agents running across all of the big cloud models, doing work for you autonomously. Magic. At least, the demos are.

  • And then ‘Moltbook’ is a forum for all of those agents to ‘talk’ to each other, which gets some people even more excited

    • Launched on January 28th, Moltbook already boasts some 1.5m accounts

    • Some popular posts involve sharing tips and tricks for better meeting requests. But not all. In the past week alone bots have used the site to, among other things, proclaim a new religion called Crustafarianism and call for the extermination of humanity.

    • BUT looks to me mostly like the old fallacy of writing “I’m alive” on a piece of paper, photocopying it, and then saying ’OMG look what the photocopier says!”)

• Anthropic released a new AI plugin for automating legal work, precipitating a mass stock market selloff over fears that the tech could upend huge software customers in industries ranging from law to finance (Reuters)

  • The S&P 500 software and services index fell by nearly 9% over five trading sessions, and is down over 20% from its October peak following the release of the AI tool.

  • Simply titled “Legal,” Anthropic says it can speed up and even automate contract review, non-disclosure agreement triage, and compliance workflows — “all configurable to your organization’s playbook and risk tolerances.”

  • This was taken as bad news for legal divisions everywhere

• à voir : Ces nouvelles pubs d’Anthropic pour le Super Bowl assassinent ChatGPT (Youtube)

• The future is here and it is weird: China’s online shopping portals use AI to fully generate the speech and picture … the model just has to stand there with a static face, not having to say anything! (the video)

• French carmaker Renault to produce long-range drones for French forces (source)

  • This is one place you don’t have to worry about competition from Chinese manufacturers anymore :)

• Ukraine says its drones carried out 820k strikes in 2025: 80% of targets destroyed, with 240k of those involving enemy personnel. (source)

• China showcases new Moon ship and reusable rocket in one extraordinary test (Ars Technica)

  • “The rocket’s first stage and the spacecraft’s return capsule were safely splashed down in the designated sea area according to procedures,”

  • The test marks a significant step in China’s push to land humans on the Moon by 2030.

• “Today, Japan holds a 50%+ global share in semiconductor materials. For specific high-end segments like EUV photoresists, that share is near 100%. (source)

  • You cannot print a chip at TSMC without Shin-Etsu Chemical.

  • You cannot coat a wafer without Tokyo Electron.

  • You cannot cut a silicon ingot without Disco Corporation.

  • Japan has an oligopolistic grip on these key areas.”

• The FT reports that KPMG pushed its own auditor, Grant Thornton, to lower their costs because they’re likely using AI, possibly not considering that all of its own clients will ask KPMG to do the same.

• OpenAI is hiring hundreds of consultants (AKA ‘sales engineers’ or ‘forward-deployed engineers’) to help enterprise clients implement ChatGPT use-cases.

  • SaaS is dead and consulting is dead because the AI can do it all….

  • 😅except you need the consultants to implement the AI as SaaS. (source)

• AI chips are expected to generate half of all chip revenue in 2026, despite making up just 0.2% of volume. (Deloitte)

• Cursive handwriting activates brain areas crucial for learning. (Nature)

• Interesting analogy for the AI revolution (Noah Smith)

  • For the first time in all of recorded history, humans no longer are — or soon no longer will be — the most intelligent beings on this planet, in any meaningful functional sense of the word.

  • Intelligence is as intelligence does. If it helps you feel unique and special to sit there and tell yourself “AI can’t think!”, then go ahead. And sure, AI doesn’t think exactly the way you do. It probably never will, in the same sense that a submarine will never paddle its fins and an airplane will never flap its wings. But a submarine can go faster than any fish, and an airplane can fly higher and faster than any bird, so it doesn’t matter.

  • People who think about this fact in terms of its impact on economics are thinking way too small.

  • When people ask “Will AI take my job?”, they remind me of a Sioux tribesman in 1840 wondering if the white settlers would take his buffalo.

  • The answer is “Yes, but you’re really asking the wrong question”.

  • For the white settlers who conquered the Great Plains, it wasn’t about the buffalo. It was about creating a whole new civilization and a whole new economic system on the land where some buffalo happened to be.

• Parlons passé

  • Oubliez Gutemberg : The invention of movable type in the 1040s in China under the thriving sOng dynasty allowed the printing of books so cheap that one philosopher griped that people would stop learning the classics by heart. (source)

  • Athens was not just the birthplace of democracy; it grew rich because it was, by ancient standards, liberal. Tariffs were only 2%. Foreigners were welcome: a Syrian ex-slave became one of the richest men in town. On a measure devised by the Fraser Institute, a Canadian think-tank, ancient Athenians enjoyed more economic freedom than citizens of any modern nation, narrowly beating Hong Kong and Singapore. (except that such freedom did not apply to women or slaves…) (source)

  • A London electricity company had a load factor of only ~10% in the early 1900s. Why? People didn’t know how to use this electricity!

  • With the advent of the Internet, broadband companies laid out a lot of cable, but in 2000 only 7% of it was lit in the US.

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Elon Musk recentre SpaceX sur la lune et l’IA

• Last week, Musk announced that SpaceX had acquired his AI company xAI in a merger valuing the new entity at a whopping $1.25 trillion. In comments at an all-hands meeting at xAI, Musk unveiled an ambitious vision for how the company could build a factory for AI data centers on the moon’s surface.

  • Why? (source)

  • xAI needs a lot of money to stay in the AGI race.

  • One source of money is SpaceX’s Starlink, whose revenue is estimated to grow from $10B today (66% of SPaceX rev) to $150B by 2030

  • But you can only use Starlink revenue for xAI datacenters if the two companies become one. So that’s most likely the main reason SpaceX bought xAI.

  • The combined company plans an IPO (entrée en bourse) in June, which hopes to raise $50bn (beating Saudi Aramco’s record of $29bn in 2019)

    • The IPO might just be to beat OpenAI and Anthropic to the market - there’s only so much capital at any one time

• On the opportunity to operate AI data centers in space (Youtube interview, )

  • “My estimate is that within 2 to 3 years, the lowest cost way to generate AI compute will be in space,” Musk said.

  • “Five years from now, my prediction is we will launch and be operating every year more AI in space than the cumulative total on Earth,” Musk continued.

  • From SpaceX update :

    • Launching a constellation of a million satellites that operate as orbital data centers is a first step towards becoming a Kardashev II-level civilization, one that can harness the Sun’s full power, while supporting AI-driven applications for billions of people today and ensuring humanity’s multi-planetary future.

    • The basic math is that launching a million tons per year of satellites generating 100 kW of compute power per ton would add 100 gigawatts of AI compute capacity annually, with no ongoing operational or maintenance needs. Ultimately, there is a path to launching 1 TW/year from Earth.

  • Analysis from interviewer Dwarkesh Patel (article) :

    • 🤔 For context, AI data centers currently consume only ~20 GW globally, and as of 2030, global data center capacity will be an estimated 200 GW, which is roughly a trillion dollars’ worth of infrastructure when you’re just putting it on the ground.

    • To send 100 GW worth of AI data centers in space in a year, you’d need roughly 10,000 Starship launches, or, about one launch every hour.

    • This is insane! A single Starship produces around 100 GW of thrust power at liftoff, Elon said. That’s about 20% of the total 500GW of average US yearly electricity power consumption concentrated in one rocket for a few minutes.

    • And the plan would be to do that once an hour, every hour, every day, for a year.

    • Elon Musk : “You could probably do it with as few as 20 or 30 [Starship vehicles]. It really depends on how quickly the ship has to go around the Earth and the ground track before the ship has to come back over the launch pad. So if you can use a ship every, say, 30 hours, you could do it with 30 ships. But we’ll make more ships than that. SpaceX is gearing up to do 10,000 launches a year, and maybe even 20 or 30,000 launches a year”

  • Here’s the physics (source):

    • Solar panels in space generate 5x more power than on Earth. No atmosphere (30% energy loss eliminated), no day-night cycle, no clouds, no weather. It’s always sunny in space.

    • No batteries needed. On Earth, you need massive battery arrays to carry you through the night. In space, continuous operation. This alone makes space solar 10x cheaper than terrestrial when you factor in storage costs.

    • Unlimited scale. Earth’s electricity output outside China is flat. It’s not growing. Meanwhile, chip production is growing exponentially. Where do you get the power to turn on all those GPUs? You can’t cover Nevada in solar panels. The permitting alone would take decades.

    • The bottleneck on Earth isn’t just energy, it’s the entire industrial base. To power xAI’s Colossus cluster (1 gigawatt), Elon’s team had to gang together turbines, fight through Tennessee permits, build across state lines in Mississippi, and run high-voltage lines miles away. It was a miracle in series.

    • The limiting factor on power plants? The turbine blades and vanes. There are only three casting companies in the world that make them. They’re sold out through 2030.

    • Space doesn’t have these problems. Once Starship achieves full reusability and high launch cadence, putting data centers in orbit becomes the path of least resistance.

  • For most compute to shift to space, all of the following things would need to be true (article) :

    • 1. Power generation on Earth hits a ceiling, or AI demand outstrips every terrestrial option.

    • 2. Chip production scales faster than anyone expects, so we have the silicon but not the electricity.

    • 3. Starship reaches thousands of launches per year.

    • If Elon’s right, he wins the AI race outright. SpaceX is the only entity that can launch at that scale. xAI would have unlimited power. Everyone else will be stuck fighting over grid interconnects and turbine orders.

    • And if Elon’s future doesn’t materialize? xAI is just another lab in the pack. Which means xAI loses. The AI race is a winner-take-all competition, and xAI isn’t in first place. Elon’s comparative advantage was never going to be navigating utility interconnect queues or filing permits faster than Google. His advantage is SpaceX.

• On the pivot to the moon

  • Musk has generally been dismissive of our other off-Earth option, the moon. Just 13 months ago, for example, he stressed that SpaceX will go “straight to Mars,” declaring Earth’s natural satellite “a distraction.” But now, apparently, it’s not.

  • His full tweet that got 45 million views:

    • For those unaware, SpaceX has already shifted focus to building a self-growing city on the Moon, as we can potentially achieve that in less than 10 years, whereas Mars would take 20+ years.

    • The mission of SpaceX remains the same: extend consciousness and life as we know it to the stars.

    • It is only possible to travel to Mars when the planets align every 26 months (six month trip time), whereas we can launch to the Moon every 10 days (2 day trip time). This means we can iterate much faster to complete a Moon city than a Mars city.

    • That said, SpaceX will also strive to build a Mars city and begin doing so in about 5 to 7 years, but the overriding priority is securing the future of civilization and the Moon is faster.

  • Follow-up tweet:

    • The priority shift is because I’m worried that a natural or manmade catastrophe stops the resupply ships coming from Earth, causing the colony to die out.

    • We can make the Moon city self-growing in less than 10 years, but Mars will take 20+ years due to the 26 month iteration cycle.

    • That is what matters most.

    • There is also an AI bonus element, but the prime directive must be ensuring the long-term survival of consciousness.

  • SpaceX blog update written by Elon Musk:

    • “Thanks to advancements like in-space propellant transfer, Starship will be capable of landing massive amounts of cargo on the Moon.”

    • “Once there, it will be possible to establish a permanent presence for scientific and manufacturing pursuits. Factories on the Moon can take advantage of lunar resources to manufacture satellites and deploy them further into space.”

    • “By using an electromagnetic mass driver and lunar manufacturing, it is possible to put 500 to 1000 TW/year of AI satellites into deep space, meaningfully ascend the Kardashev scale and harness a non-trivial percentage of the Sun’s power.”

  • The Kardashev scale, named after the Soviet scientist who came up with it in 1964, classifies civilizations based on the amount of energy they can control.

    • Type I civilization can harness all of its home planet’s power;

    • Type II can exploit the entirety of its star’s energy, via a Dyson sphere or other such structure;

    • Type III has its entire galaxy’s output at its fingertips.

    • Obviously, humanity has not even made it to Type I yet.

  • Manufacturing on the Moon.

    • Lunar soil is 20% silicon. Mine it, refine it, create solar cells on the Moon. Aluminum for radiators, which is also abundant on the Moon. The chips? Those you’d send from Earth initially (they’re light). Eventually, maybe you make those on the Moon too.

  • What is a mass driver ? : Un lanceur de masse est un système futuriste conçu pour envoyer des objets dans l’espace sans utiliser de fusée classique ni de carburant

    

    • Le principe : C’est un peu comme un canon magnétique géant. Il utilise des aimants électriques très puissants disposés le long d’un long rail.

    • Le fonctionnement : Une charge (un conteneur avec du minerai, un satellite, etc.) est placée sur ce rail. Les aimants s’allument les uns après les autres très rapidement, ce qui attire la charge, l’accélère et l’éjecte à une vitesse incroyable vers l’espace.

    • Les avantages :

      • Pas de carburant : Il utilise de l’électricité, donc il est plus économique à long terme.

      • Réutilisable : Le lanceur reste au sol et peut être utilisé plusieurs fois.

    • Où l’utiliser ? Idéalement sur la Lune ou sur des astéroïdes, car il n’y a pas d’atmosphère qui freine l’objet, et la gravité est faible.

    • En résumé : C’est une catapulte électromagnétique pour lancer des matériaux dans l’espace sans fusée.

  • Elon’s eyes light up when he talks about the lunar mass driver:

    • “I really want to see that. Can you imagine some mass driver that’s just going shoom, shoom, shoom? Just shooting AI satellites into deep space one after another. That would be a sight to see. I mean, I’d watch that.”

  • Another possible reason for the pivot: competition is heating up (Ars Technica)

    • Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin has finally started to deliver. The company has now flown and landed its New Glenn rocket.

    • Multiple sources have told Ars that Bezos has told his team to go “all in” on lunar exploration.

    • This includes the development of a crew transportation system, Blue Moon Mark 1.5, that does not require orbital refueling.

      • SpaceX’s Starship, on the other hand, will require around 10 to 12 tanker flights to fill the vehicle with propellant before it sets off on a lunar mission (source)

    • This raises the possibility that Blue Origin might land humans on the Moon before Starship, a threat sources at Starbase say SpaceX is beginning to take seriously.

  • Robert Zubrin, celui qui avait refilé le virus de Mars à Elon Musk, est furieux (source):

    • Musk is making a huge mistake. It is impossible to build a self-growing city on the Moon because the materials required to support life are either absent or prohibitively difficult to extract. Even where they exist, they are found in forms vastly less accessible than on Earth — or even Mars.

    • We are carbon-based life forms. We are made of carbon compounds, as is everything we eat or wear, and most of the things that we use. There is no carbon on the Moon. The other essential components of life are water and nitrogen. Aside from ice trapped in ultracold (–230°C), permanently shadowed craters near the lunar south pole, water exists on the Moon only in parts-per-million concentrations within the regolith. Nitrogen is effectively absent, as are concentrated mineral ores.

    • The Moon does contain oxygen, but only chemically bound in rock. Extracting it requires complex, energy-intensive industrial processes operating at extremely high temperatures. This would sharply increase the cost and drastically shorten the operational lifespan of the necessary equipment.

    • In contrast, the materials necessary to support life and civilisation — including carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, water and enriched mineral ores — are widely available in readily useable forms on Mars.

    • The Mars-to-Moon shift has other significant flaws. While the Moon is indeed closer to Earth, the rocket propulsion requirement to travel one way from Earth to the lunar surface is 50% greater than that needed to go to Mars.

      • Car la lune n’a pas d’atmosphère, donc il faut utiliser beaucoup de carburant pour décélérer et tomber à 0 km/h.

      • Alors qu’en arrivant sur Mars on peut s’aider de l’atmosphère de la Planète Rouge, certes très ténue, pour ralentir sa fusée, “shed velocity” (bon, avec un bon bouclier thermique, mais le problème est pire en rentrant sur Terre)

    • The return leg would be even more challenging: producing propellant on the Moon is far more difficult than doing so on Mars, effectively tripling the propulsion requirements for a round trip.

    • Mon entretien exclusif avec Robert Zubrin: “Why Elon Musk’s Mars plan will fail” and how to do it right (Youtube, Spotify, Apple)

      • Robert Zubrin is an American aerospace engineer known for writing the bestselling book The Case for Mars which famously inspired Elon Musk to go to Mars!

      • The two are in touch and Robert has been sharing feedback with Elon Musk for years..

      • But lately Robert Zubrin has been quite critical of Elon Musk’s approach, he explains why in the podcast!

• SpaceX’s mission is not worded exactly the same way now!

  • Previously: To make humanity multiplanetary.

  • Now: Extend consciousness and life to the stars.

  • For Musk, Consciousness doesn’t require life. AI can be conscious. Musk realizes that the consciousness that will conquer the universe is artificial.

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• 🔒 Main take-aways of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s latest 30-page essay about confronting and overcoming the risks of powerful AI

• 🔒 Why AI is no longer a bubble

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Merci, et à bientôt !

Thomas