alt Hacker NewsWhat precisely is the moat surrounding AI that SpaceX is using to justify this kind of spending spree? I don't how SpaceX and other AI companies will be able to keep the weights of their AI models private in the face of interest by virtually everyone in the world. It would be absolutely trivial for a nation state to walk into a data center using a state issued security certificate to seize a few of the physical servers running the cloud services of OpenAI / Grok / Claude. Copying the weights is trivial. Infiltrating a company with spies as new hire coders to gain access to source code is also trivial.
This is really starting to feel like the pets.com era again.
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Cursor is a harness that can be used with all kinds of models. It's a much better harness than anyone else's and takes the company out of just playing the model game.
Exactly this. I think valuations and the AI market could get stirred up if:
- We get an open source Opus 4.8 equivalent and pair it with an open source coding agent
- Running this OS stack becomes cheaper than what frontier model providers charge (see OS model prices on OpenRouter vs. frontier lab prices)
- This happens across verticals (i.e. not just software)
The first “DeepSeek moment” didn’t do much damage back in the days, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a similar moment becomes a lasting, effective, cheaper alternative.
> I don't how SpaceX and other AI companies will be able to keep the weights of their AI models private
That is an interesting point. If there are higher concerns, copyright law is easily ignored, and only one person needs to get access to the data once.
SpaceX is good at building data centers in tough regulatory environments, in a way that other players have been unable to match
They are a distant third at best, at least in trading companies. If you look at Chinese and other likely national actors, they are probably further down.
The thing with dotComs is that they didn't have THIS level of unsustainable financing burn, and a tangible issue of token processing cost that has no magic wand coming with the current practical limits of Moore's law.
Because there's nowhere else for the money to go, the money must go to AI.
There are no growth opportunities in any other industry (except healthcare due to disastrous demographics), where else are people going to invest?