The Frontier

Planet is a public company operating the world's largest Earth-observing satellite fleet, with its stock increasing 450% over the last year. The company generates 25 terabytes of imagery daily from its 200 satellites.

Will Marshall coined the term 'Large Earth Models,' which combines planetary sensing data with large language models to enable AI to understand the physical world, moving beyond theoretical text-based knowledge.

Planet has indexed the Earth for searchability over the last decade, accumulating a 150-petabyte archive of 3,000 images for every landmass point. This historical data is crucial for comparing current conditions to past norms.

Planet's satellite fleets offer varied resolutions: a scanning fleet (Owl) upgrading from 3-meter to 1-meter, a high-resolution system aiming for 30-centimeter daily imagery, and a Tanager hyperspectral imager with 400 spectral bands.

Will Marshall states Planet's revenue is approximately 60% from defense and intelligence, 25% from civil government, and 15% from commercial clients. AI is lowering barriers to entry, making space data accessible to more entities.

Planet is placing Nvidia chips on its satellites for edge processing and satellite-to-satellite communication, significantly reducing data analysis time from hours to seconds for time-critical applications like disaster response.

Project Suncatcher involves putting TPUs for Google into orbit, an early step towards orbital AI compute. A Google study suggests compute in orbit will be cheaper than terrestrial when launch costs reach $200-$300 per kilogram.

Will Marshall argues that while launch costs are important, the long-term competitive advantage in orbital compute will depend more on compute efficiency (flops per watt) than on raw launch capacity.

Will Marshall maintains Earth is by far the best planet, emphasizing the need to protect its unique biosphere. Space technology's primary role should be to help manage Earth intelligently, not solely for off-world colonization.

The 'AI brain drain' saw key researchers Noam Shazeer (Transformer paper lead) move from Google to OpenAI and John Jumper (Nobel laureate, AlphaFold co-creator) from Google DeepMind to Anthropic.

Alex argues that Google DeepMind has fallen behind OpenAI and Anthropic in frontier AI models, influencing top researchers to seek raw access to cutting-edge models in smaller, more agile organizations.

Will Marshall believes that AI needs to interact with the physical world through sensors and actuators to achieve true intelligence and consciousness, moving beyond current 'brains in a vat' large language models.