Google Is Taking Its AI Chips to Orbit. The Math Stays on Earth -- AI Brief September 25

Good day %%first_name%%. Google is putting its AI chips on a rocket, Meta wants you typing video games into existence inside Instagram, and a frontier model just broke a 1941 German Enigma message that cryptographers couldn’t. Meanwhile, most companies still can’t tell you whether their AI spend is paying off. Let’s get into it.

Google Is Sending Its AI Chips to Space Google

* What happened: Google announced Thursday that it will launch a prototype satellite carrying its Tensor Processing Units, the chips it trains and runs its AI on, into low Earth orbit on October 1, aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 from Vandenberg Space Force Base. The satellite was built with Planet Labs, and it’s the first in-orbit test of Project Suncatcher, Google’s research into whether AI data centers could one day run in space.

* Why it matters: AI’s real bottleneck is electricity and cooling, and in a sun-synchronous orbit solar panels can be up to eight times more productive than on Earth. Yesterday, the Pentagon’s AI chief said capacity is what scares him. Google’s answer is to go looking for power above the atmosphere.

* What everyone’s saying: The hardware news is good. Per The New York Times and Unite.AI, the chips survived proton-beam radiation testing at UC Davis beyond what a five-year mission would deliver, and the refrigerator-sized craft passed its shake tests with every screw holding. The skeptics point at Google’s own math: launch prices need to fall below $200 a kilogram, a level projected for the mid-2030s, before orbital compute can compete.

* My read between the lines: One satellite answers “does the chip survive,” not “does the business work,” and Google published the number that answers the second question itself. When the plan only pencils out once launch costs hit a price nobody expects for another decade, what goes up on October 1 is a chip test with an excellent press strategy. It’s still worth watching. The first company to run a data center on free sunlight gets to stop negotiating with utilities.

📖 Further reading: Neo-Napster: The Compute Revolution Nobody Saw Coming -- Google is betting compute moves up. This one makes the case it’s already moving onto your desk.

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Meta Wants You to Type Games Into Instagram The Verge

* What happened: At Connect on Thursday, Meta unveiled Horizon Create, a phone app, and Horizon Studio, a browser editor. You describe a game in plain language and get a playable 2D or 3D game with multiplayer, progression and difficulty balancing built in, then publish it straight to Facebook and Instagram, where people play it in the feed without downloading anything. Early access opens through a waitlist next year.

* Why it matters: Yesterday we covered Muse Charm from the same stage. This is the same idea pointed at entertainment: AI makes the thing, and Meta’s feed distributes it. In Meta’s words, “someone scrolling through Instagram can tap a clip of your game and be in a multiplayer session within seconds.”

* What everyone’s saying: Investors took it seriously. Unity fell 5% and Roblox and AppLovin slipped 1% each. Android Central’s hands-on came away impressed that you can import your own assets and hand-tweak what the AI generates, which pushes it past the usual AI slop.

* My read between the lines: Horizon has been Meta’s most expensive ghost town. The Verge notes it had 300,000 monthly users as of early 2022, and Meta briefly shut Horizon Worlds down on Quest this year. The fix isn’t a better game. It’s to stop asking people to come to the games and drop the games into the feed they already can’t stop scrolling. That’s a distribution move dressed up as a creativity tool, and it’s a smart one.

📖 Further reading: The Netflix of the Future: How AI-Generated Shows Are Changing Everything -- written in 2024 about shows. Meta just shipped the version for games.

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