CTO of Technology & Society @Google, working on fundamental AI research and exploring the nature and origins of intelligence. Order "What Is Intelligence?" ⬇️
Seattle
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In 1981, my father brought home my first computer, a Texas Instruments 99/4A. He was convinced computing would change the world. As "What Is Intelligence?" arrives in bookstores today, I’m reminded of how right he was.
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Yesterday, our Project Suncatcher prototype satellite launched aboard the Transporter-18 rideshare mission with SpaceX, taking the first Google TPUs beyond Earth’s atmosphere.
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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.
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Our peer-reviewed research paper detailing the system design is now live open access in Joule:
sciencedirect.com/science/ar…
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!
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Up, up, and away. 🚀
Today, in partnership with @planet, we launched a prototype satellite carrying four TPUs into orbit on @SpaceX's Transporter-18 rideshare mission. This launch is the first step of Project Suncatcher, our long-term research moonshot to see whether we can one day host scalable machine learning infrastructure in space.
Over the coming weeks, we'll gather in-orbit data on how our TPUs handle the physical stress, radiation, and thermal extremes of space. Whatever we learn, we'll use it to refine our future designs.
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Blaise Agüera (@blaiseaguera.bsky.social) retweeted
Mission success! All 20 payloads were successfully launched.
We’ve already made contact with @Google’s Project Suncatcher, Tanager-2 & two SuperDoves – and all are healthy! The remaining SuperDoves await deployment thru D-Orbit (as expected)! 🛰️🛰️🛰️🛰️
Thanks to @Google and @carbonmapper for teaming together, and to @SpaceX for the ride up!
With this mission, we’ve now launched 718 satellites on 43 rockets. This was the first time we’ve had three different satellite types flying together! + we have another launch in a few weeks from Cape Canaveral. 🚀 investors.planet.com/news/ne…
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This week marks one year since “What Is Intelligence?” was published.
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!
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.
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“What Is Intelligence?” (@mitpress & @antikythera_xyz) is available in paperback, E-book, online, or audiobook (read by me): blaiseaguera.com/what-is-int…
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I have been fascinated by old science fiction ideas about using stars for computation since I was a kid.
But it was only about three years ago, during a convening on the future energy demands of AI, that I began to think about it seriously: what if we actually moved our machine learning hardware closer to its ultimate power source, the Sun?
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That question became Project Suncatcher, our research effort to scale machine learning compute in space.
Following our announcement last year, we are now preparing for our first prototype launch in partnership with @planet to test TPU radiation resilience, orbital mechanics, and vacuum cooling.
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This first mission is strictly about collecting data to see what works, and we look forward to sharing more soon. I am incredibly proud of my Paradigms of Intelligence colleague Travis Beals and the rest of the team driving this awesome (in multiple senses) science and engineering project forward.
Read more about the engineering behind the launch in today’s blog post: blog.google/innovation-and-a…
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The popular narrative of AGI often centers on a single, isolated super-intelligence. My colleagues James Manyika, @bratton, and I have a different model. In our new DeepMind Institute essay, we argue that the AGI transition will be a highly social event.
bit.ly/artificial-symbiotic-…
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This shifts the core challenge. It is no longer just about building a smarter isolated machine, but designing healthy scaffolds, institutions, and interfaces. We need to construct structural frameworks where diverse human and artificial agents can collaborate reliably.
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What do we actually mean when we talk about “AGI”?
Enjoyed discussing this with George Musser for his latest piece in @sciam.
scientificamerican.com/artic…
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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.
As Peter Norvig and I argued back in 2023, we effectively crossed the general intelligence threshold when models mastered language, because competence at language inherently involves open-ended task generality.
x.lingyaoai.com/blaiseaguera/status/17…
Artificial General Intelligence is Already Here, from @NorvigPeter and me on @NoemaMag "Today’s most advanced AI models have many flaws, but decades from now they will be recognized as the first true examples of artificial general intelligence." noemamag.com/artificial-gene…
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A beautiful demonstration of symbiogenesis in action in the world of artificial life from one of our student researchers in Pi, @kjha02. Evolving agents on a shared memory tape, he and his co-authors show that when compute is a budgeted resource, cooperation emerges organically. Parasitic behavior simply exhausts the energy required to copy code and replicate.
Read the preprint here: arxiv.org/abs/2609.10817
Can self-interested, self-improving, self-replicating agents learn to cooperate?
Our new paper, Tapes Together Strong, shows they can: when social behavior, computation, and reproduction share one energy budget, cooperation evolves from scratch.
arxiv.org/abs/2609.10817 🧵
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