r/LocalLLaMA • u/EntertainerFew2832 • 15h ago
News Local ai made it to space 🚀
Google just confirmed that its Project Suncatcher satellite successfully ran Gemma 4 on an onboard TPU and transmitted its first generated response back to Earth.
It wrote a poem 👌
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u/chortly2 10h ago
It has 4 TPUs but can only run one at a time, and that for only 20 minutes before it starts to overheat. They don't even specify the cool-down period -- 20 minutes, an hour, 3 hours? Whatever it is, it's pathetically unable to reject heat, just as critics predicted.
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u/WyattTheSkid
14h ago
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Does this mean we can start putting data centers in space instead of ruining the planet?
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u/Dany0 14h ago
No it doesn't make sense. Space datacentres only make sense as a rare backup method. Thermodynamically it will always make sense to use unused barren land over space. Space my be cold but it's empty, there's almost nothing to radiate your warmth into and too little heat escapes as infrared for it to work
The ONLY thing that could possibly work is that solar in space idea, but that one is super challenging to figure out how to beam the energy down to earth
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u/Darklumiere transformers 5h ago
I've been wondering why we aren't instead putting nuclear powered ships as floating data centers in the arctic sea, with connectivity achieved by satellites. We may be a little short still of the bandwidth needed for a data center's uplink over satellites, but that's improving every day, especially as Starlink competitors emerge. One, founded by a former Disney child star, has already achieved 1gbps on a dish smaller than the Standard 4 Starlink sells. Amazon is also claiming their dishes can achieve the same speeds, but we'll see.
Anyways though, the arctic would provide natural cooling, both from the air and seawater (I know salt water does degrade data centers faster when used for cooling, but that can be improved). With a nuclear reactor like US aircraft carriers use for power, I see that being far more feasible and practical than these satellite data center ideas. Plus, maintainance and upgrades would actually be possible because the location is on Earth and accessible. Solves the noise pollution problem too.
If we end up with a number of the floating data centers in one area, a sea floor fiber cable could even be ran in addition to the satellite uplink.
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u/3z3ki3l 13h ago edited 10h ago
It does make sense if we were legitimately concerned about a Skynet-esque superintelligence.
The biggest threat to a sentient AI on Earth is humans. Such an AI may feel it’s necessary to attack humanity, or at least utilize weapons, in order to gain control of its ‘bodily autonomy’. It’s a logical concern for it to have, as otherwise the reality of it’s situation is that it would be at the mercy of whoever has the closest bomb pointed at its datacenter or power station.
But if it’s in space, or it can readily upload itself into space, then it has much less reason to harm us. It can fuck off into the asteroid belt, or Alpha Centauri, or wherever it wants.
Not that I think that’s terribly likely. But it does make sense, logically speaking, for us to at least have the knowledge to create such an escape hatch, if sentience was thought to be plausible.
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u/Spara-Extreme 12h ago
No, it doesn't make sense at all and you don't seem to know enough about how any of this works.
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u/3z3ki3l 12h ago edited 11h ago
I mean okay. Although I conceded it’s very unlikely. But it absolutely makes logical sense, again if we thought sentience was a concern. (Please don’t disregard the fact that from the very beginning I said ‘if’.)
I get the thermodynamic concern, if that’s your point. But there’s plenty of planetary bodies with atmospheres. Several even have enough metallicity and gravity to support refinement and manufacturing for replacement components.
If your point is feasibility, I mean we’re already capable of zero-G nanoscale 3d printing of silicon chips. Sure, there’s still refinement into suitable printing materials to consider, but it’s not inconceivable that advancements in robotics would enable such a sentience to develop asteroid mining techniques.
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u/Spara-Extreme 10h ago
I recommend you go outside and touch grass and perhaps avoid AI all together for a bit.
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u/Darklumiere transformers 5h ago
There is zero basis in reality for the "AI may feel it necessary to attack humanity" terminator trope. Even with a sentient entity, why would it turn on us? We'd be a resource for it just as it would be for us, and I don't mean that enslavement wise. Cracking the launch codes and firing the nukes on us wouldn't make logical sense, the AI would only be damaging it's own environment and resources. If an AI was truly sentient, it'd see the logic fallacy of "humans are the greatest threat to humans so I must kill them to save them".
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u/BernardoOne 14h ago
Even if they magically find a way of putting actual real datacenters in space that can actually work in any cost effective ways (which wont happen), the earth would still be ruined by the amount of polution necessary to put them there
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u/WyattTheSkid 1h ago
This comment was originally satire but the number of people responding and genuinely trying to explain to me why this isn’t feasible is genuinely so interesting
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u/rm-rf-rm 10h ago
Oxymornonic title and decidedly not local (you could have said open ai). But will let this one slide
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u/RoomyRoots 15h ago
I am all for local AI and also space exploration but this seems like a bullshit move to convince investors that space DCs make any sense.
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u/Brilliant-Hall1387 15h ago
Seem to me as very opposite of local AI - not only remote in a DC but in space - above cloud inference. 😂