Synthetic intelligence (AI) is a foundational expertise that would reshape our world, driving new scientific discoveries and serving to us deal with humanity’s best challenges. Now, we’re asking the place we will go to unlock its fullest potential.
The Solar is the last word power supply in our photo voltaic system, emitting extra energy than 100 trillion occasions humanity’s whole electrical energy manufacturing. In the best orbit, a photo voltaic panel will be as much as 8 occasions extra productive than on earth, and produce energy practically 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, Challenge Suncatcher, envisions compact constellations of solar-powered satellites, carrying Google TPUs and related by free-space optical hyperlinks. This method would have super potential for scale, and likewise 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 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 formidable 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.
Challenge Suncatcher is a part of Google’s lengthy custom of taking over moonshots that deal with robust scientific and engineering issues. Like all moonshots, there will likely be unknowns, nevertheless it’s on this spirit that we launched into constructing a large-scale quantum laptop a decade in the past — earlier than it was thought-about a practical engineering aim — and envisioned an autonomous car over 15 years in the past, which finally grew to become Waymo and now serves hundreds of thousands of passenger journeys across the globe.
