Space, AI, and the Next Wave of Inventions

Recently, Elon Musk announced that he was taking SpaceX public. This could give rise to the largest IPO ever seen; however, I believe there is something more interesting. As part of the regulatory filings completed ahead of the IPO, SpaceX released their spend figures. Interestingly, AI was the single largest spend for the company last year, with SpaceX committing over $12.7 billion. This accounts for approximately 61% of SpaceX's total spend.

What's clear through these filings and SpaceX's latest deals, including the Anthropic deal, delivering ~$15 billion a year, and their recent moves to purchase Cursor for ~$60 billion, is that AI is a core focus at SpaceX and they have no plans to slow down anytime soon.

I find this a very exciting opportunity for both the future of space exploration and AI.

Never before have we seen a non-government-funded space program with the resources available to SpaceX, with a reported spend of $42 billion this year and that figure doubling YoY for the last 2 years. If this continues at this rate, it will be comparable to the Apollo missions, where the US government spent ~$25.8 billion (~$280 billion accounting for inflation) over a 12-year stretch (1960-1972).

Although this spend was unpopular, many fantastic inventions we have today come as a direct result of the engineering that went into the Apollo missions. These include memory foam, fireproof suits, cordless power tools, water filtration systems, and countless computer and technical advancements that would lead to inventions such as MRI machines and guidance systems.

I believe, given the rate of innovation, SpaceX can bring about another wave of advanced engineering and acceleration to the AI race, due to the complexity of the problems that must be solved in order for space missions to be possible and AI's ever-evolving ability to solve these problems. It will create a feedback loop similar to what we have seen internally with Anthropic's models.

We already live in a world where a new invention gets released every day, and I believe this will accelerate massively in the coming years. With the vast amount of resources being poured into programs at this scale, I find it hard to believe that Artificial Intelligence will not be found in every aspect of our lives in the future. Culturally and economically, it will be hard to predict and measure the impact that AI might have, but for the progress of science and technology, I believe it's clear that AI will be the single largest driving factor.