Google confirms contact with Project Suncatcher prototype

Google has confirmed contact with its Project Suncatcher prototype satellite and says the craft is operating as expected after launch, the company wrote Thursday. The satellite, built with Planet, rode to orbit on SpaceX’s Transporter-18 rideshare mission, according to a Google Research post by Travis Beals. Google frames the flight as an early step in a long-term research effort on whether space could host scalable machine learning infrastructure. Over coming weeks, it says, it will gather in-orbit data on how its TPUs handle the physical stress of spaceflight and the radiation and thermal extremes of space. A peer-reviewed paper on the work is out in Joule, Google says.

Google has also posted DiarizationLM-Gemma-4-E4B-v1 on Hugging Face under Apache 2.0. The model card describes it as a large language model that post-processes automatic speech recognition and speaker diarization outputs, built on Google’s Gemma 4 E4B. The card says it is not an officially supported Google product.

Earlier coverage

• People linked to Kimi maker Moonshot AI were behind a core cluster of a July campaign to pull hidden reasoning from OpenAI’s models, OpenAI says.
• Barclays expects half its developers to use Anthropic’s Claude Code by year-end, Anthropic says.
• Micron reported record quarterly results and forecast about $61.5 billion in revenue for its next quarter as AI drives memory demand, the company says.

— Lark Pemberton