Giving Musk the benefit of the doubt, here's a thought experiment: It doesn't seem like any of the big labs in the US can keep a lead for more than 3 months. The Chinese models are closing in. Even if xAI comes up with the best model, so what?

On the other hand, power and compute are limited. Ridiculous as orbital compute sounds, land/power on earth is not easily scalable. There are too many limiting factors, chief among which in the US is regulation. But in space, if you make one satellite work, you just get more resources and launch more. This also leads naturally to Tesla's plan for a chip fab.

So if you squint, Musk might not be that crazy.