Memory cost and capacity are significant issues for AI accelerators.
Unlike game rendering, model inference can have a deterministic memory access pattern. You don’t need “random access memory” at all for model weights, and you could tolerate cold-start latencies in the multiple milliseconds, as long as continuous reads were delivered at the necessary bandwidth.
NAND flash is over 100 times cheaper per GB than HBM, so there should be opportunity there, even after giving a flash controller a 1024 bit interface with HBM bandwidth.
You could make a specialized pin protocol that just supported pipelined transfer of full 16KB+ pages from the flash to program-managed accelerator scratchpad memory and improve per-pin performance over HBM, but it might be more convenient to make it still look like a true random access memory with very fragile performance characteristics, where anything but sequential reads falls off a 1000x+ performance cliff.
That has the advantage of automatically using existing cache hierarchies, and providing a natural path to update the flash memory with new model weights. With the stream-to-scratch interface, code has to be completely rewritten before it works at all, while the ram-emulation interface will start off just extremely slow, and you can incrementally sort out the changes for full performance.
There may be cases where there isn’t enough scratchpad SRAM to hold the weights for a layer, which might force you to deploy the old optical drive optimization technique of duplicating data in multiple places on a sequential read to avoid seeking, but there would be capacity to burn.
It might be possible to do something like cuda graph capture to record a memory access trace and have everything magically remapped to a linear sequence, but deploying programmer / agent elbow grease to manage transfers and access in a scratch ram ring buffer would be lower risk.
A split memory system consisting of some channels of flash and some channels of HBM will probably be suboptimal compared to a uniform memory, but it could be much cheaper, and allow much larger models to be run.
I think th case is strong for inference, but you have to stretch more for training. You can still linearize all the weight memory accesses, both reads and writes, but flash memory would quickly wear out from the writes, even if they were all perfectly page aligned. Replacing low-latency HBM with massively parallel cheap(er) DRAM at high latency might still be a worthwhile cost savings.
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255M views on a 3D Short by Zack D. Films
i tried to rebuild his style with ONE Claude prompt, then ran it on Opus 5.5 and Fable 5.2 (they did NOT make the same Short)
the full prompt is below ↓
paste it into Claude Code in an empty folder and answer its 2 questions. it shows u the script and waits for ur go. u need Blender + its free MPFB add-on and a graphics card. give it a few hours (the prompt is minus one optional paid-voice line)
Ask me 2 things, then wait:
1. The story in one line: a strange TRUE event where one person did one odd physical thing ("He tied 42 weather balloons to a lawn chair."). If I say "you pick", pitch 3 with one source link each and take the first unless I choose.
2. The voice. Default: Kokoro (free, runs on my computer), a calm, warm male narrator.
Then tell me everything else is free: Blender (find my install, or tell me the one download), its free MPFB extension for human bodies (ask me before you install it) and into this folder a Python venv with FFmpeg (imageio-ffmpeg), kokoro-onnx + its model files (kokoro-v1.0.onnx and voices-v1.0.bin from the kokoro-onnx GitHub releases), faster-whisper (small.en), numpy and Pillow. It needs no API key or account and renders on my graphics card with EEVEE.
The look: a clean, realistic 3D world, like a good game cutscene. Bright, saturated, a little filmic.
- People: realistic bodies with generic faces and big readable expressions (shock, a smirk, a scream). Plain clothes, no logos. Never a real person's likeness: for a real person keep the face out of close-ups (hands, back, side, distance, straight top-down).
- CALM shots only. Bodies in fast action or contact (running, jumping, fighting, falling) look stiff, so tell the story with frozen moments under a slowly moving camera, macro inserts of hands and objects, rooms, vehicles, the sky, top-down views and the aftermath.
- One new picture for every caption chunk (2-4 words, about 1-1.5 s): a new framing, a new action or a camera move. Nothing ever holds still: every shot drifts, pushes in or orbits.
- The shot kit: macro insert (extreme close-up of the key object or hands, very shallow depth of field), hero low angle (wide lens at waist height), god's-eye top-down with a slow rotate, tracked object, over the shoulder, smash zoom on the word that matters, whip pan between beats, glow highlight (the named object glows orange with a rim, then fades), a big 3D number lying in the scene, a thought bubble (a cloud ring showing what he hoped for), a TV in the scene replaying the event.
- Light: a bright warm sun, blue sky with clouds, soft shadows. Night scenes use hard lamps and a dark sky. Wide lens up close, depth of field on every shot, motion blur on every fast camera move.
- Captions: 2-4 words at a time, white bold rounded sans, about 64 px on a 1080 px-wide frame, centred, 78% down the frame, soft dark shadow, no box. Each chunk replaces the last on the same frame as its picture.
- Banned: real footage, photos, downloaded textures or 3D models, logos, AI images or AI video, downloaded music, gore.
38-50 s, 100-140 words, 150-180 words a minute. The voice starts at 0.0 s.
- Line 1: the most surprising physical act, in past tense, opening with "He" (or "She"). No name, date or setup. Frame 1 shows that act.
- Then a cause-and-effect chain: every sentence starts with a hinge word (Then, Suddenly, So, Because, But, Later) and is ONE visible action.
- The context arrives late, after "You see,".
- A reveal: someone looks closer and the story turns.
- The last line is the consequence. No call to action, no question.
- Names are rare: use one only when it pays off.
Title = "He ..." or "The Man Who ...". The cover is the first frame.
Save every stage to disk so a crash never costs more than one stage.
- sources.md: every fact with its link and the date you read it. Anything you can't verify stays out.
- script.json: the lines and the caption chunks cut by hand (2-4 words, one picture each), each chunk with its shot: the set, the camera, what moves.
- Kokoro reads the whole script in one take (speed 1.0-1.1) and pauses are squeezed to 0.35 s at most; faster-whisper times every word (pass it a 16 kHz numpy array, not a path); write chunks.json with each chunk's start and end. A picture and its caption switch together on frame round(start*30)+1.
- blender/: Python scripts run headless (blender -b -P). makes one .blend with the sets, the cast, the props and every shot baked with a key on every frame. sets EEVEE with ray tracing, the AgX view with the Punchy look, motion blur, depth of field and bloom in the compositor. Bodies come from MPFB or are built by you; clothes, hair, props and sets are built in code.
- Stills first: one half-size still per shot as a contact sheet. Look at every tile and fix what's off before any full render. Time one full-size frame and tell me the estimate.
- Render 1080x1920 at 30 fps to PNG frames, skipping frames already on disk.
- numpy only: a light music bed, a sound on every action (a whoosh on each whip pan, hits, wind, room tone), ducked under the voice, mastered to -14 LUFS on the whole stereo mix.
- burn the captions in from chunks.json. Encode out/_9x16.mp4 (1080x1920, 30 fps, TV-range yuv420p) and out/_x_7x8.mp4 (1008x1152, under 10 MB, 2-pass): a crop of the 9:16 frame that keeps the subject and the caption.
- Blender paths: pass absolute output paths (a relative one lands on the drive root).
- MPFB headless: enable it with addon_utils.enable("bl_ext.user_default.mpfb"). Bake a body's shape keys before you pose it: the rig is fitted to the baked shape.
- Clothes: cut them from the body mesh and push them 7-16 mm out along the normals; keep two rings of body faces under every hem.
- Nothing coplanar: keep every resting object 1 cm off its neighbour and draw ground markings into the texture, or they flicker.
- Hair: EEVEE draws hair only from a Curves object, hair type STRIP. Use a Principled BSDF on it (the Hair BSDF renders black).
- Skin: keep subsurface weight near 0.2 (more turns faces black in EEVEE) and add a soft fill light from below under a noon sun.
- Hands: a curled hand reads as a claw from the palm side, so shoot a grip from behind the knuckles.
- Motion blur: shutter position START, a key on every frame, plus a key half a frame after each shot's last frame, so blur never reaches across a cut.
- Check: run a black-frame and one-frame-flicker check on the render. Make a contact sheet (a frame every 0.5 s) and look at every tile: the act reads in the first 2 s, faces are lit, nothing clips through anything, captions stay off faces and key objects. Then step through the first 2 s, the middle and the end frame by frame. Fix, render only the changed shots again.
Pitch (or take my story), then show me the script with the word count, the caption chunks with their seconds and the shot list with what the first frame shows. Build nothing until I say go.
how the two runs went: one run each on the same PC, so it's one sample, not a ranking. both took under 3 hours on one shared 8 GB graphics card. the story for both: a man who tied 42 weather balloons to a lawn chair in 1982
where they split:
-> Opus opened wide on the balloons over the yard. Fable opened on the man kneeling at the chair with his Jeep behind him
-> Opus put 5 big 3D numbers in its scenes, Fable 2
-> Fable followed the caption spec (white text, soft shadow). Opus went ALL CAPS with a thick outline
-> Fable pulled the Smithsonian's own record and ended on the chair in the museum. Opus ended on the $1,500 fine
-> a few Opus shots are hazy and one opens on a blank grey frame
save this for ur next Short. who did it better, Opus or Fable?
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Grok Bot summary: IAC 2026 presentation by SpaceXAI President Michael Nicolls.
🎯 The main message
- SpaceX was founded in 2002 to make life multi-planetary and "extend the light of consciousness to the stars."
- He said the biggest risk as constellations grow is not debris. It's satellite operators not sharing data with each other.
🌍 How Starlink grew
- Starlink began in 2019 with 60 V0.9 satellites. User service started in late 2020 as the "Better Than Nothing Beta."
- V1.5 added space lasers, which let the satellites link into a mesh. That's when Starlink really took off, reaching oceans, Antarctica and airplanes.
- V2 (2023) has 4x the capacity of V1. Falcon launches V2 satellites 2–3 times a week, and each launch adds about 3 terabits of capacity.
- V3 launched on Starship about a week before the talk. Each V3 satellite has another 10x capacity, and each Starship launch carries 20–30x what a Falcon launch does.
- Starlink now has over 11,000 satellites, about 60% of all active satellites in low Earth orbit.
- It serves more than 13M customers in about 170 markets, plus ships and planes.
- The laser mesh means Starlink doesn't depend on local ground infrastructure. During last year's fires and power outages in Spain, it kept tens of thousands of customers and emergency responders online.
🚀 The life of a Starlink satellite
- **Before launch:** SpaceX checks that deploying the satellites won't bring them close to anything else, and shares where they'll be.
- **Deploy:** satellites are released below 300 km, where almost no other operators fly.
- **Orbit raising:** each climb path is checked against other satellites and crewed space stations, and SpaceX publishes the satellites' positions every hour on the way up.
- **Lower orbits for safety:** the original plan was about 1,000 km. Now every satellite flies below 500 km, and V3 will fly at about 350–360 km. At these heights a dead satellite falls back to Earth within months instead of staying up for centuries.
🛡️ How they avoid collisions
- Each satellite makes small station-keeping moves about once a day and a collision-avoidance move about every 10 days.
- Across the fleet, that's about 1,000 avoidance moves a day.
- Starlink's threshold for moving is nearly 100x more cautious than the industry standard, so the whole fleet's collision risk is about the same as a much smaller constellation's.
- "Ducking" moves turn the satellite so it presents a smaller target during a close pass, cutting the collision risk about 10x more.
- Automated software makes these decisions, which is why Starlink tries to stay in contact with every satellite at all times.
📡 Always connected
- Starship's live launch video was streamed over Starlink.
- The new V3 satellites connected to the network within 2 minutes of release, because Starlink terminals are built into the satellites. Their lasers link into the mesh within tens of minutes.
- The goal is to make contact right away and never lose it.
🌬️ Space weather
- During a 2024 solar storm, air density in orbit jumped 5x in a few hours, which throws off predictions of where satellites will be.
- Starlink is "probably one of the best sensors" for this. It measures density in real time and automatically corrects its position forecasts.
🔭 Working with astronomers
- **Optical:** SpaceX tried Vantablack paint and sun visors. What finally worked was a mirror-like film that reflects sunlight away from the ground, combined with careful steering. A V2 satellite now looks about as bright as a sheet of paper. This was done with groups like the Vera Rubin Observatory.
- **Radio:** working with observatories like the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), Starlink steers its beams and frequencies around where the telescopes are pointing. As a result, the telescopes can now observe more often.
♻️ End of life
- SpaceX uses statistics to predict when parts will fail and deorbits satellites early. Many of those satellites would have kept working.
- Retired satellites are steered down within weeks, not left to drift for the 5 or 25 years regulations allow.
- They're built to burn up completely, and reentry is aimed over the ocean.
- Of about 10,000 satellites launched by early 2026, only a few dead ones remain in orbit. The goal is zero.
- "Reliability and rate go together."
⚠️ The biggest danger: other operators
- Tracked debris is like obstacles on a road: if you can measure it, you can avoid it.
- What you can't avoid is a satellite that maneuvers without telling anyone. Starlink has had passes as close as tens of meters this way.
- Starlink has maneuvered around satellites from about 650 operators in recent months, but shares position data with only about half of them. "That number is too low."
- SpaceX shares data with China's space station and some Chinese operators. Many operators don't share at all, including some in the US, Europe and Japan.
⭐ Stargaze: Starlink's own space tracking
- Over 30,000 star trackers on Starlink satellites spot passing objects as streaks against the stars.
- Stargaze now tracks over 17,000 objects, including about 90% of the maneuvering satellites that cross Starlink's orbits.
- In one example, an untracked satellite's predicted 9 km miss shrank to about 60 m after it maneuvered toward Starlink. Stargaze caught the move and the Starlink satellite dodged in time.
- He said it's still no substitute for operators sharing their plans in advance.
🤝 The ask: share your data
- SpaceX runs its own space safety data platform, and over 100 operators have signed up.
- Operators can upload their satellite positions and check them against Starlink and against Stargaze tracking.
- His message to every operator was to join the platform and share their positions.
🧠 StarMind: AI compute in space
- StarMind is SpaceX's planned AI satellite constellation, starting launches and scaling next year.
- The goal is to move AI compute off Earth. He expects StarMind to drive demand for Starship launches the way Starlink did for Falcon.
- On the ground, SpaceX is building over 2 GW of compute in Memphis. He said AI demand will be nearly limitless, and Earth's resources make that hard to keep scaling there.
- In space, the satellites run on solar power and shed heat through large radiators.
- Each satellite is simpler than a Starlink: basically a computer with big solar panels and radiators.
- Each one has about 250 kW, roughly one NVL72 rack of compute.
- They'd fly in tight clusters of about 10 satellites linked by about 10 terabits of bandwidth, then connect to Starlink.
- SpaceX has filed for up to **1 million satellites**, in low-inclination and sun-synchronous orbits. Building them could mean thousands of satellites a week.
- New challenges include much higher reliability and redundancy, flying in close formation, and micrometeoroids. Dead satellites might be sent away from Earth instead of burning up in the atmosphere.
🌙 Beyond Earth
- Starlink is developing very high-bandwidth lasers to connect the Moon, then Mars, building an "interplanetary mesh."
- All of that depends on getting safety right in low Earth orbit first.
💡 Key takeaways
- Starlink is the world's biggest constellation, and it's moving lower to be safer.
- It makes about 1,000 collision-avoidance moves a day, with nearly 100x more caution than the industry standard.
- The biggest risk is operators who don't share where their satellites are going.
- StarMind could scale to 1 million AI satellites, with launches starting next year.
- "Coordination is a key element for realizing all of our ambitions."
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