[ExI] Power satellites are being developed now

[Adrian Tymes]

On Sat, Dec 20, 2025 at 1:57 PM <spike at rainier66.com> wrote:
> The most effective use of rooftop solar is to charge one's own PowerWall during the day, then dump the accumulated power into one's Tesla at night.  That reduces peak load demand on the power station, and contributes directly into supplying ammo in the form of available electric power for the AI arms race.  Moral: if you have the bucks, by all means, install rooftop solar forthwith, along with a PowerWall.

That's what I did at my last residence in California.  Also for about
20 years prior, to power my own mini data center.  It was just
prototypes and personal stuff - I never got a single million bucks off
of it - but I imagine some might take advantage of the hype these days
to put a personal data center in a house and sell it as a feature.

Out of curiosity, I asked ChatGPT what kind of AI a rack like I had
could run.  Its answer:

> A single rack of modern pizza-box servers can run:
>> An AI system comparable to the best openly available models today (30B–70B), with advanced tooling, autonomy, and multimodal inputs — but not frontier-scale training or hyperscale deployment.
>
> Put differently:
> It’s far more powerful than “lab scale”
> Far less powerful than OpenAI / Google / Anthropic clusters
> Squarely in the “nation-state / serious industrial / defense contractor” tier

It's technically true that a certain defense contractor ran its main
compute on that particular rack, all powered by rooftop solar +
battery backup (which was later replaced by a PowerWall) on the house
that rack was in, for some years.  Further iteration suggested that,
if limited to one or a few users at a time and with serious hardware,
it could run something equivalent to GPT-4 for text reasoning.  Such a
system would need more power and a lot more cooling than I had
installed.

That is of course a generation or two behind the publicly accessible
stuff, and will likely remain so for the indefinite future.  It might
be interesting as a pure backup scenario, but the odds that anyone who
could afford such a setup will ever seriously be in a "cut off from
infrastructure but still inside their own home" scenario - where this
would actually be useful - this side of the Singularity is vanishingly
small, even if one puts the Singularity some time in the 2100s.