I heard a NASA scientist give an actual good reason for AI in space: avoiding lag when AI-dependent satellites are in high earth orbit. If the AI in the satellite needs a cloud-datacenter-size LLM, then they really do need all those GPUs close enough for replies within a few hundred milliseconds. High altitude orbit to Earth make that intractable.
BUT for anyone on Earth, the exact same logic works in reverse – the AI data centers will have crazy high lag. There are literally multiple companies making “high bandwidth orbital download” by physically jettisoning hard drives from orbit and recovering them in the desert
Also data transfer.
I heard a NASA scientist give an actual good reason for AI in space: avoiding lag when AI-dependent satellites are in high earth orbit. If the AI in the satellite needs a cloud-datacenter-size LLM, then they really do need all those GPUs close enough for replies within a few hundred milliseconds. High altitude orbit to Earth make that intractable.
BUT for anyone on Earth, the exact same logic works in reverse – the AI data centers will have crazy high lag. There are literally multiple companies making “high bandwidth orbital download” by physically jettisoning hard drives from orbit and recovering them in the desert