Congratulations to Travis Beals and all of the Project Suncatcher team as well as our partners at Planet Labs. I am so excited for us to learn and scale up!

This flight runs four TPUs on short duty cycles to measure thermal loads in a vacuum and track radiation resilience. We expect failures, and that telemetry will help us design future multi-satellite missions.

Seeing our hardware go up turns an idea that sounded like science fiction not so long ago into a real prototype.

Moving from thought experiment to real spaceflight required many months of debate, testing our assumptions, poking holes, running simulations, and eventually stress-testing TPUs with particle accelerators and other forms of torture.

I’ve been thinking for quite a while about direct solar power for AI in space.

Yesterday, our Project Suncatcher prototype satellite launched aboard the Transporter-18 rideshare mission with SpaceX, taking the first Google TPUs beyond Earth’s atmosphere.

Hearing how you have connected with the book has meant so much. Thank you for reading, and an extra big thank you to those of you who have reviewed it, recommended it, or given it to friends.

It was a really fun book to write. I knew that some of the material would be dated by the time it reached readers. But I hoped that, despite rapid progress in AI, the core ideas about life and intelligence would endure. So far, so good, I think!

This week marks one year since “What Is Intelligence?” was published.

Incredibly proud to have Blake on our Paradigms of Intelligence team. We benefit from his perspective and expertise every day, and this recognition of his academic work is exceptionally well-deserved. Congrats, Blake!

Much of today’s discourse conflates generality with superhuman capability, but a pocket calculator is superhuman at arithmetic while narrow in scope, whereas language models are general even when imperfect.

This, despite the obvious fact that Alex was talking, and by all accounts, had a wicked sense of humor to boot. His last words to her, before unexpectedly dying overnight in 2007 and bringing a three-decade-long collaboration to an end, were “You be good. I love you. See you tomorrow.”