Smells like a cover story for military AI module validation testing.
The AI industry spends crazy money to reduce latency and increase density. The act of placing resources in space, to be used by people on earth, only increases latency, and reduces density. The performance metrics are ops/power/space/$, not G ratings, unless its being validated for flight.
Maybe. But it’s also Google, a company famous for just spending money on random crap. Data centers are politically toxic right now, and Elon Musk’s bloviating made it trendy to discuss AI in space. Maybe they think that following this trend with a relatively simple launch will raise the stock.
I think it’s somewhat impressive they got it into orbit quickly since surely a year ago this wasn’t an earnest idea, and I think it’ll be interesting to see the affects of space on high end chips and connectivity fabric.
But also I agree that this just doesn’t make sense from a performance standpoint.
Terrestrial data centers are having a hard time connecting to power. What’s the good of a $40/Watt compute asset you can’t turn on? Spending $10 or even $20/Watt extra to get power by sending inference load to orbit starts to sound like a bargain, and that’s doable with today’s launch vehicles. With high reuse, that number drops to below $1/Watt for 24/7 power, which makes it cheaper than any terrestrial energy source.
And the vast majority of compute load is inference. Part of the training process benefits from a large, coherent (ie low latency) data center, but that’s a minority of the load nowadays.
Also: low Earth orbit is already pretty low latency. A lot of people’s intuitions about space latency are from when satellite internet was based out of distant geosynchronous satellites, but even that is probably just fine for most inference workloads.
What would a radar constellation look like that could see everything on earth to a metre or so resolution? Thousands and thousands of satellites all with big phased array radios and solar panels and batteries.
What do you need to distill a 24/7 stream of everything on Earth in roughly 1m^3 voxels into data like humans and vehicles? Bearing in mind the data torrent is gigantic and can't always be reliably downlinked: co-orbital AI.
I would be extremely unsurprised if some amount of the 'starshield' customized starlink satellites recently launched for the DoD have at least some modest amount of general purpose hypervisor/server capacity on them, possibly with limited GPU-like capabilities for certain software. At least as a small scale test.
One of the "holy grail" things the military has wanted for a long time is to be able to treat a satellite not just like a bent pipe repeater but to do active signal processing and data processing such as for communication between disparate air and ground, naval units.
NIMBY numbers rising on recent data center buildouts.
People who think AI is going to destroy humanity.
People experiencing real financial hardship due to AI job displacements.
If google is going to issue press releases, which sounds better ?
"Google putting data centers in space, not your backyard"
or
"Google testing TPU chips for doomsday skynet laser weapons"
The boys at the pentagon procurement department can read between the lines.
> Smells like a cover story for military AI module validation testing.
I was trying to rack my head for any possible way this made sense and was coming up empty. Normally i mistrust conspiracy theories like this, but its the only explanation that seems remotely plausible.
I've been in the tech industry for awhile, and it's all I can think of as well.
After reading others comments, I'm trying to imagine the utility of having AI training, inference, intelligence filtering, etc in space, like, spy satellites all sharing an AI hub, and that doesn't make sense either. They can just as easily download spy satellite images, and apply "as much AI as they can print money to buy" to it, and not be limited.
As a for profit company, google has a fiduciary obligation to not piss away money on projects that have no foreseeable commercial value ( unless fee contracted by an external entity to do so ).
I'm sticking with "flight validation for AI super weapons" as the only revenue stream I can foresee.
It ticks both the "potential revenue stream" and "legit R&D tax benefits" boxes.
Kevin_Flynn · · focus · HN ↗
The AI industry spends crazy money to reduce latency and increase density. The act of placing resources in space, to be used by people on earth, only increases latency, and reduces density. The performance metrics are ops/power/space/$, not G ratings, unless its being validated for flight.
vineyardmike · · focus · HN ↗
I think it’s somewhat impressive they got it into orbit quickly since surely a year ago this wasn’t an earnest idea, and I think it’ll be interesting to see the affects of space on high end chips and connectivity fabric.
But also I agree that this just doesn’t make sense from a performance standpoint.
Robotbeat · · focus · HN ↗
Also: low Earth orbit is already pretty low latency. A lot of people’s intuitions about space latency are from when satellite internet was based out of distant geosynchronous satellites, but even that is probably just fine for most inference workloads.
formvoltron · · focus · HN ↗
150kw design Launch on 4000kg is 4 million. 150kw solar Radiator Electronics
20/watt is 3 million. We are above your budget.
Robotbeat · · focus · HN ↗
georgefrowny · · focus · HN ↗
What do you need to distill a 24/7 stream of everything on Earth in roughly 1m^3 voxels into data like humans and vehicles? Bearing in mind the data torrent is gigantic and can't always be reliably downlinked: co-orbital AI.
walrus01 · · focus · HN ↗
One of the "holy grail" things the military has wanted for a long time is to be able to treat a satellite not just like a bent pipe repeater but to do active signal processing and data processing such as for communication between disparate air and ground, naval units.
<a href="https://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/usa-350.htm" rel="nofollow">https://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/usa-350.htm
askvictor · · focus · HN ↗
Kevin_Flynn · · focus · HN ↗
NIMBY numbers rising on recent data center buildouts. People who think AI is going to destroy humanity. People experiencing real financial hardship due to AI job displacements.
If google is going to issue press releases, which sounds better ?
"Google putting data centers in space, not your backyard"
or
"Google testing TPU chips for doomsday skynet laser weapons"
The boys at the pentagon procurement department can read between the lines.
askvictor · · focus · HN ↗
bawolff · · focus · HN ↗
I was trying to rack my head for any possible way this made sense and was coming up empty. Normally i mistrust conspiracy theories like this, but its the only explanation that seems remotely plausible.
Kevin_Flynn · · focus · HN ↗
After reading others comments, I'm trying to imagine the utility of having AI training, inference, intelligence filtering, etc in space, like, spy satellites all sharing an AI hub, and that doesn't make sense either. They can just as easily download spy satellite images, and apply "as much AI as they can print money to buy" to it, and not be limited.
As a for profit company, google has a fiduciary obligation to not piss away money on projects that have no foreseeable commercial value ( unless fee contracted by an external entity to do so ).
I'm sticking with "flight validation for AI super weapons" as the only revenue stream I can foresee.
It ticks both the "potential revenue stream" and "legit R&D tax benefits" boxes.