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"Next Year's News This Week" IS THE FUTURE OF SOLAR IN SPACE? By Berit Anderson ______ Why Read: Globally, solar deployment continues to accelerate, as China drives cheap solar adoption worldwide. But even built on the backs of Chinese solar-company profits and forced labor, more acceleration is required. The next frontier may be in space. ______ Silicon Valley's Space Rule of Thumb It's an unwritten rule of Silicon Valley that, when the physical limitations of Earth become too cumbersome and investor enthusiasm begins to waver, one need simply propose that same activity in space to unlock new levels of market boosterism, marketing oomph, and investment dollars. It's the Big Tech equivalent of the show Portlandia's "Put a bird on it" catchphrase. Elon Musk, with his newly overflowing purse, was the original master of this: convince the Valley you can solve all of our climate problems just by moving humanity to Mars. And people believed him because he was a real climate guy. He pioneered electric sportscars, after all. After a time, it became clear that life on Mars will never - at least in my lifetime - be particularly enjoyable; and the Valley, for one sweet moment, really got behind climate tech. But that was hard, and it took a long time. People were getting bored. So everyone was thrilled to see LLMs emerge. Especially investors, who promptly pulled their money out of very difficult and time-consuming things like carbon capture and energy storage and threw it into LLM model building - a technical thing that is both scalable and that everyone could once again pretend would solve all of our Earthly problems. AGI can do anything, right? We've now reached that slightly awkward point in the hype cycle in which the realities of LLMs are becoming too obvious. More and more experts (and everyday users) are starting to question their utility. They use huge amounts of energy, and it turns out they're actually hurtling us even faster toward a time when this planet will be unable to support living things. All for a "personal assistant" that lies to you somewhere in the range of 75% of the time and can't even write a LinkedIn post that doesn't bore thinking humans to tears with its corporate jargon. So, it's almost predictable that the media hype cycle this week has focused on putting LLM compute into space. "Lots happening this week," wrote entrepreneur John Bucknell on LinkedIn: The hyperscalars are coming around to the idea that PV is a lot more productive in space and launch costs are low and dropping. Starcloud launched their first GPU into orbit, Elon said Starlink will be a direct competitor and Google announced similar Project Suncatcher. Why? Because the economics of launch, PV and electronics manufacture are at a state where we can source energy from orbit for any use. Bucknell is the CEO of Virtus Solis Technologies, a space solar company that represents one potentially positive externality of this latest shuffle. As Google published in its Project Suncatcher release: In the right orbit, a solar panel can be up to 8 times more productive than on earth, and produce power nearly continuously, reducing the need for batteries. In the future, space may be the best place to scale AI compute. Working backwards from there, our new research moonshot, Project Suncatcher, envisions compact constellations of solar-powered satellites, carrying Google TPUs and connected by free-space optical links. This approach would have tremendous potential for scale, and also minimizes impact on terrestrial resources. Google, it seems, has finally come around to the strategy of our Future in Review Plan A.
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