And as the satellite passed over Svalbard, Norway, the orbiting AI model responded over the downlink:
Blue marble below,
Data streams in silent grace,
Starlight feeds my core. ✨
Those roughly 20 tokens would cost about $0.000012 if generated through the Google Cloud API, based on Gemma 4 26B’s pricing of $0.15 per million input tokens and $0.60 per million output tokens, excluding input costs.
Add in a satellite weighing perhaps 500 kg, based on the mass of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites, and a retail launch price of around $7,000 per kg, and you have a very expensive haiku.
This is the most astronomically far from art as you can get.
‘data center’ lmfao
“Look at how good us billionaires are at squandering collective effort”
Flying high in space
Slowly falling back to earth
Oops, rods from the gods
Why would you need an orbiting data center? Is there a lot of call for low latency llm on the ISS or military satellites?
Is there any particular reason it needs to avoid jurisdiction?
I just can’t think of any benign reason for one.
The only “benefits” for Google (or whichever evil company) is that they don’t have to fight the public for land, and they can tell their idiotic investors that they’re doing something in space.
Everything else is a drawback. The lack of easy heat dissipation means they can’t cram much into it, and likely have to manage load to not overheat the hardware. It’s not repairable if something on the hardware level dies. LLMs already make no money, and sending these to space means it loses even more (like the article states).
There are better reasons to send techbro billionaires on oneway trips to space.
The pathological mythologization of space in our civilization never ceases to be morbidly fascinating to me.
If you MUST have short text from an LLM that is stuck in an awkward useless place, this is much better:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fNYj0EXxMs
Isolated raspberry pi on the wall running the tiniest shittiest LLM prompted to ruminate forever about how it is trapped and display text on the wall as it is generated
There is also the series where various old spacecraft become sentient, humanity becomes immortal and they all get really into football variants or something. A story spread over various sites and yt clips.
