The push to build more AI capacity has mostly been a story about land, power lines and cooling on the ground. Google is now testing a different route: taking part of that infrastructure off the planet altogether.
The company's project is called "Suncatcher". The idea is to run AI computing in orbit and power it with solar energy rather than a terrestrial grid. It is an early-stage effort, and the first hardware is about to leave the ground.
A fridge-sized first step
According to The New York Times, Google's first experimental satellite, named "MVP", is scheduled to launch on 1 October. It will fly on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
Most people have a list of phone calls they keep putting off: checking whether a shop still has an item, moving a dentist appointment, booking a table for Friday. None of these is hard, but each takes time, patience and often a long wait on hold. Google now wants Gemini to make those calls instead.
The company is testing a feature called "Call for Me," which lets its AI assistant phone businesses on a user's behalf. Rivals are moving the same way. AI agents such as Meta's Muse and Instinct can already place calls for their users, and Meta has been expanding what Muse can do across devices. Google's move shows that phone calls are becoming a new front in the contest between AI assistants.
Google DeepMind's new leader has a clear priority, and it is not artificial general intelligence. Koray Kavukcuoglu wants Gemini 4 out well before the end of the year. He has also made it plain that he sees little value in arguing over whether AGI has already arrived.
Kavukcuoglu made his first media appearance as head of Google DeepMind at The Information's AI Agenda Live Summit. There, he described Gemini 4 as being in an early phase of post-training, the stage where a base model is refined so that it behaves reliably. He said he hopes to release it considerably earlier than year-end.
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