Futurescan Weekly W1 - Top 8 Highlights in Space, Science and Hard Tech - May 23, 2024

By Brian Wang

Here is the weekly highlights on space, science and hard tech for the week of May 23, 2024. I will being the top 8 highlights in space, science and hard tech every week. Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture, has unique abilities to identify high potential technology and science winners. This information is valuable to improve investment picks and returns and for strategic insights which can unlock potential. It can identify opportunities in your long term career and business plans and identify gaps and risks for business models and in future business ecosystems.

1. Teslabots can accelerate AI. I identified the importance a relationship between compute used for AI training and the compute used for AI inference (providing answers with AI). If the AI inference compute is about 30 times larger then the AI training can be about ten times less. If we hit practical limit on the size of AI training data centers then increasing from a laptop with 100 watt hours of compute for a 20 teraflop chip (Apple M2) to a 3000 watt hour humanoid bot with a 4 Petaflop chip (Nvidia H100) then you get 200 times the inference compute. This lets the Large Language model AI can be equal to a GPT 6 or GPT7 instead of GPT5 next year.

2. Nvidia reported that the H200 chip running Meta Llama 3 can make 7 times more money over 4 years than the chip costs. This is hugely important because the tens of billions being spent on Nvidia chips will return profits to fund more spending on AI.

3. SpaceX has hit several milestones. SpaceX launched 87% of the global orbital payloads in Q1 2024. SpaceX might exceed 90% of all Earth payload to orbit later this year. Once Starship is launching at high rate then SpaceX will probably be lanching over 99% of global orbital payload. Starlink sales are speeding up as Starlink now has over 3 million customers. This is up 700k from 2.3 million in February. Starlink should reach about 4-6 million customers by the end of this year.

4. Here is my detailed analysis of the China Robotaxi industry. There are about 5 companies in China that are all about Waymo scale. They are in more cities than Waymo. There are several with 10-25 cities across China and Asia.

5. Baidu with its Apollo robotaxi network is arguably the leading robotaxi company in the world. They have driven over 60 million robotaxi miles versus 10-20 million for Waymo. They have about 500 robotaxis operating in ten cities in China and could be in 65 with thoudands of taxis next year and with profitability in 2025. The CEO of Baidu stated his interest in working with Tesla and its FSD technology. This shows that Tesla with FSD goes beyond the hypermapped, Lidar approach to self driving.