Google's Project Suncatcher satellite runs its first AI prompt in orbit

Google's first Project Suncatcher prototype, built with Planet Labs and launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare on 1 October, is online after about three weeks of commissioning. Engineers sent it its first prompt this week, and the on-board Gemma 4 model wrote a haiku about being in space and answered telemetry questions. The satellite carries four TPUs and generates up to 1 kW, but power limits mean it can run only one TPU for about 20 minutes at a time. Next it will test how the chips cope with heat and radiation in orbit; two more satellites with inter-satellite optical links are planned for 2027.