7 comments

  • loufe 29 minutes ago
    This was a completely vapid article. I expected some technical details at least, but instead it's an LLM generated poem confirming it worked in a short interval, which nobody doubts it would. All eyes are on long term heat dissipation and the impact of radiation and success of radiation hardening meterials and processes.
  • 6thbit 8 minutes ago
    So their weights are just floating up there?

    I suppose it’s beyond hard anyone would hijack their satellite but still. Wonder if they put any physical security on it anyway.

  • aftbit 34 minutes ago
    Putting AI in space is a silly idea. How do you cool it reliably? How do you handle rad-hardness? How do you even get the gear up there? It's one of the most expensive places to put mass.

    Using geothermal power or floating solar arrays in the ocean makes way more sense. It's much easier to access, you have water for a heat sink, and you're far away from anyone or anything that would really care.

    More controversially, if geothermal or solar doesn't pan out, you could power it via nuclear microreactors (just what I want floating in my world's ocean) or gas that would otherwise be flared off from a deep sea oil well (CO2 non-withstanding).

    • numpad0 12 minutes ago
      Satellite cooling is long figured out, the problem is that it requires a ton of expensive mass.

      Radiation hardening is not a huge issue in LEO either. It is an issue, not the issue.

      Overall, it's like choosing international flights as your choice of a restaurant. It's...fundamentally...doable...? But nobody knows why you would want that, unless flying GPUs is the point rather than to offer a competitive service using the server sats.

    • smallerize 23 minutes ago
      It is expensive, but the radiators won't necessarily push the state of the art. https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/07/how-hard-is-it-to-buil... The current test is to see how big an issue rad-hardness actually is.
    • orf 18 minutes ago
      Someone made a good point on a previous comment like this: the main selling point is the public can’t destroy them
  • smallerize 57 minutes ago
    I still can't think of a use case for this besides making it difficult to shut down illegal AIs.
    • UltraSane 16 minutes ago
      Unlimited power and real estate with zero local opposition.
    • BurningFrog 47 minutes ago
      The standard motivation is 24/7 unfiltered sunlight to power the AI with, where you're not in anyone's backyard and don't need to convince a planning commission.
      • randomblock1 43 minutes ago
        You do, though. The FAA/AST govern launches. I'm no rocket scientist but building a rocket and launching it is probably much harder than building a small data center.
    • ls612 51 minutes ago
      The entire concept of an illegal AI is something I hope never comes to pass.
      • AtlasBarfed 41 minutes ago
        AIs are already doing illegal things
        • ls612 30 minutes ago
          AI doing something illegal and AI being illegal are very different things
          • smallerize 26 minutes ago
            Well, that's what I meant primarily. An AI that is doing something damaging.
  • avaer 55 minutes ago
    Google taking a lesson from the marketing school of Musk? Public spectacle to boost stock price?
  • Havoc 50 minutes ago
    > poem confirmed success:

    What a load of horseshit. A model running on a ESP32 running off a questionable powerbank supply with dodgy coding and worse storage reliability can do that.

    The only thing anyone cares about is whether the (economic)math works on put AI in space.

  • aaron695 1 hour ago
    [dead]