TL;DR
Somewhere above the Arctic, a satellite the size of a refrigerator was sent a prompt, ran it on an AI chip in orbit, and answered with a haiku about being in space, which the report quotes as "Blue marble below." It is the first reply from Google's Project Suncatcher prototype, which carries four of Google's AI chips and is testing whether AI computing can one day run on sunlight in orbit. Right now it is a tiny start: one chip at a time, for about 20 minutes, on stored solar power. But the hardware turned on, ran a real AI model and talked back, and Google says two linked satellites come next, in 2027, if the chips stand up to heat and radiation. To see our odds on when computers in orbit grow from one chip into something like a data center, and the timeline of breakthroughs that leads there, subscribe.
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