Google's AI satellite sends a very expensive haiku to Earth

The company's Suncatcher satellite, rolled out at the start of the month and put into low Earth orbit, has responded to a ground station prompt to "Write a haiku from the perspective of a TPU orbiting Earth, with the wonderful world spinning beneath you." Travis Beals, senior director of Google's interdisciplinary Paradigms of Intelligence research team, said that with Suncatcher's host and TPU trays powered up and machine learning tests completed, the onboard Gemma 4 model achieved its "Hello World" milestone by sending an inference response from orbit. "During a ground-station pass, we uplinked our first prompt to our onboard Gemma 4 open model, asking it to generate a haiku about being in space," wrote Beals in a blog post.