Artificial intelligence just crossed a boundary once reserved for science fiction, with a Starcloud satellite running Google DeepMind’s Gemma model beyond Earth’s atmosphere for the first time.
Starcloud CTO and founder Ezra Feilden unveils the massive milestone in a post on LinkedIn.
“Very happy to announce we have used our NVIDIA H100 on Starcloud-1 to run inference with Google DeepMind’s Gemma model – the open source version of Gemini.
These are Gemma’s first words in space.
‘<< Greetings, Earthlings! Or, as I prefer to think of you – a fascinating collection of blue and green. Let’s see what wonders this view of your world holds. I’m Gemma, and I’m here to observe, analyze, and perhaps, occasionally offer a slightly unsettlingly insightful commentary. Let’s begin!'”
Starcloud is a Washington-based AI startup backed by Nvidia, pioneering the development of space-based data centers.
In a statement to CNBC, Starcloud CEO Philip Johnston says Starcloud 1’s operation is proof that hyperscalers can run space-based data centers without facing the energy constraints that define AI supercomputing on the ground.
“Anything you can do in a terrestrial data center, I’m expecting to be able to be done in space. And the reason we would do it is purely because of the constraints we’re facing on energy terrestrially… This very powerful, very parameter-dense model is living on our satellite. We can query it, and it will respond in the same way that when you query a chat from a database on Earth, it will give you a very sophisticated response. We can do that with our satellite.”
In November, Google announced plans to send AI chips into space to harvest energy from the sun in tightly clustered satellite formations. In the same month, Elon Musk said that SpaceX’s Starship can deliver solar-powered AI satellites to orbit that could far surpass energy generation on Earth.
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