Synthetic intelligence (AI) is a foundational expertise that would reshape our world, driving new scientific discoveries and serving to us sort out humanity’s best challenges. Now, we’re asking the place we will go to unlock its fullest potential.
The Solar is the final word power supply in our photo voltaic system, emitting extra energy than 100 trillion occasions humanity’s complete electrical energy manufacturing. In the precise orbit, a photo voltaic panel will be as much as 8 occasions extra productive than on earth, and produce energy almost constantly, lowering the necessity for batteries. Sooner or later, house could also be the very best place to scale AI compute. Working backwards from there, our new analysis moonshot, Mission Suncatcher, envisions compact constellations of solar-powered satellites, carrying Google TPUs and related by free-space optical hyperlinks. This strategy would have large potential for scale, and in addition minimizes influence on terrestrial assets.
We’re enthusiastic about this rising space of exploration, and our early analysis, shared in the present day in “In the direction of a future space-based, extremely scalable AI infrastructure system design,” a preprint paper, which describes our progress towards tackling the foundational challenges of this bold endeavor — together with high-bandwidth communication between satellites, orbital dynamics, and radiation results on computing. By specializing in a modular design of smaller, interconnected satellites, we’re laying the groundwork for a extremely scalable, future space-based AI infrastructure.
Mission Suncatcher is a part of Google’s lengthy custom of taking over moonshots that sort out powerful scientific and engineering issues. Like all moonshots, there shall be unknowns, nevertheless it’s on this spirit that we launched into constructing a large-scale quantum pc a decade in the past — earlier than it was thought of a sensible engineering purpose — and envisioned an autonomous car over 15 years in the past, which ultimately turned Waymo and now serves hundreds of thousands of passenger journeys across the globe.