Bluepoint’s reported shutdown is just the latest example of Sony struggling after buying up nearly a dozen studios since 2019
Bluepoint’s reported shutdown is just the latest example of Sony struggling after buying up nearly a dozen studios since 2019
The Document Foundation announced LibreOffice 25.8.5 today as the fifth maintenance update to the latest LibreOffice 25.8 office suite series with various bug fixes.

Monster Strike made an ex-Capcom producer a ton of money that he then spent in-game
Merged today to Mesa 26.1 Git is a one-line change to the Intel “ANV” Vulkan driver that is showing to deliver some slight performance benefits or up to 3% noted in some select games…


As commonly seen with other malware, attackers
Table of Contents
Zwift’s Fitness Metrics, initially released in April of 2025, help to answer common questions from endurance athletes: “How am I doing? Can I train more? Should I train less? What’s my potential?”
But if you’re new to riding or running, these metrics may be a bit confusing. So we’re here to help!
If you aren’t sure how to use Zwift’s Fitness Metrics, or what they’re even telling you, read on…
As a cyclist, if you want your Training Score to be accurate in Zwift, you must have your FTP (functional threshold power) value set accurately in your profile.
What is “FTP”? It is the wattage you can stay below and sustain for longer durations, while going above it causes fatigue to set in very quickly. Most riders, if they put in a steady but maximal effort on fresh legs, can hold their FTP for 40-60 minutes.
Your Training Score is directly based on the Stress Points accumulated with each ride, and Stress Points are calculated from your FTP (see below).
So if your FTP isn’t accurate, your Stress Points won’t be, either, which means your Training Score won’t be accurate.
FTP is also used to calculate power targets in ERG workouts – for example, a VO2 interval may have you ride at 110% of FTP for 4-minute intervals. So you’ll want an accurate FTP value if you’re doing structured workouts on Zwift as well.
Zwift will automatically estimate your FTP based on your power bests as you ride or race in the game. But if you want a more accurate FTP value, I recommend taking an FTP test.
Related: How (and Why) to Take an FTP Test on Zwift >
Once your FTP is set accurately, the Stress Points (SP) calculated for each ride will be accurate. SP is just a Zwifty name for TSS, an industry-standard metric developed by TrainingPeaks that combines both time and intensity into one number indicating how much stress a particular workout puts on your body.
Related: All about TSS (Stress Points) in Zwift >
You don’t need to know how SP are calculated to use them, although this post has the formula if you’re curious. To give you some idea of typical SP ranges, an easy 1-hour recovery ride may be around 40-50 SP, while a 1-hour race will be closer to 90-100 SP, and a 3-hour endurance ride may be more like 150-180 SP.
If you’re syncing outdoor rides to Zwift, but don’t have a power meter on your outdoor bike, Zwift will do its best to estimate your SP for the ride, much like Strava estimates your power even on rides without power data. If you want your training metrics to be truly dialed in, though, maybe it’s time to get a power meter on your outdoor bike?
I recommend the Favero Assioma pedals. They’re the most respected in the industry, more affordable than most, and easy to install (unlike crank or spider-based power meters).
Buy them on Amazon >
Read my Favero Assioma Duo review >
Zwift uses industry-standard algorithms to compute SP for runs:
You can show SP in real-time in Zwift’s HUD by selecting it for one of the display metrics via Menu>Settings>HUD:
SP are also shown on the Ride/Run Report when completing an activity, and on the Progress Report screen if you’ve set a fitness goal based on SP:


If you do any outdoor riding or running (and most of us do), you’ll want to get that data into Zwift’s system. Otherwise, your Fitness Metrics won’t be accurate, since they won’t include your outdoor efforts!
You’ll need to record your outdoor session on a device such as a bike computer (aka “head unit”), smart watch, or even your phone. I’m partial to Wahoo’s bike computers, but Zwift supports importing outdoor rides from Garmin, Wahoo, and Hammerhead accounts.
Learn how to connect Garmin or Wahoo to Zwift >
Learn how to connect Hammerhead to Zwift >
Your Training Score in Zwift is the 42-day exponentially weighted moving average of your training load. What does that mean in simple terms? It means your Training Score is an average of your daily SP, weighted so recent sessions affect the score more than older ones. Note that “Training Score” is more often called “Fitness” in other apps, or “Chronic Training Load/CTL” in TrainingPeaks.
This comment from ZI reader R. Chung (yes, that Chung) unpacks how Training Score is calculated: “The ‘42-day exponentially weighted moving average’ (and the 7-day version) don’t mean they’re an average over the previous 42 days. That’s a common misconception. It means the exponential decay rate is 1/42 days = 2.38% per day (and the 7-day decay rate is 1/7 = 14.28% per day). The 2.38% decay rate means about three-eighths of the TSS from a ride is still around after 42 days, not zero.”
You can see your current Training Score in the Companion app at the top-left of the Fitness Trends box:
It is also shown on the Progress Report screen, along with a value showing how much your session changed the score:
Your Training Status is also displayed in the Companion app and Progress Report. It will place you in one of the following categories:
Zwift Training Status is based on a metric that other apps call “Form” or “Freshness”. This is calculated as your current Training Score minus your current Fatigue. (Fatigue is calculated similarly to Training Score, except it’s only a 7-day exponentially weighted moving average of your training load instead of 42-day.)
Since Zwift likes to keep metrics simple, they don’t display this Form/Freshness value. Instead, they simply chart it in the Companion app under “Fitness Trends”, so you can see where you’re trending:

So that’s how all of Zwift’s Fitness Metrics work. But how do you actually use them?
In some ways, that’s a very individual question, and thus impossible for me to answer. A qualified coach could look at your data and give you some really helpful insights, though!
But there are some general principles, and some obvious use cases, which apply to just about everyone.
First: it’s worth mentioning that your Zwift Training Status is not an indicator of how well you may feel on a given day. If you’re anything like me, Zwift may often say you’re “fresh,” but your legs disagree! That’s OK. Training Status summarizes overall Training Stress Balance (TSB), giving a sort of zoomed-out view of your current freshness, which may not match how you feel on the day.
If your Training Status is “Overreaching”, you’ll want to ease up soon. The great Joe Friel says, “…if you spend much time here you will create great fatigue and are flirting with extreme overreaching that would likely become overtraining if continued for too long.” Typically, you’ll automatically ease up training at this phase, because the body simply can’t keep overreaching. But be careful if you find yourself here.
Zwift’s Fitness Metrics are just a Zwifty (that is, simpler and more colorful) version of the commonly-used Performance Management Chart seen in coaching plans on TrainingPeaks and other platforms. These charts show the detailed results of periodized training plans, where athletes typically go through sections of training in the “productive” zone, take a recovery week to enter the “fresh zone,” then start another block of training. Often, these training plans are structured with a target event in mind, and athletes will taper their training in the week or two leading up to it.
You may not have a coach or the expertise to structure a full training plan, but you can use Zwift’s Fitness Metrics to help determine an effective training load for your situation. The metrics won’t tell you which workout to do each day, but they’ll help you manage your overall training load. And that’s half of the battle! While it’s good to know which specific workouts will help you most, so much of endurance training is about building up a training load. Getting on the bike. Running the planned distance. Putting in the work. Consistency.
So put in the effort to get into the productive zone, then take a week off after 3-4 productive weeks. And if you get into overreaching, don’t panic. But also, don’t keep digging that hole deeper!
Those are just a few tips and thoughts, but training management is a huge topic with plenty of rabbit holes. So I’ll leave it here for now.
Lastly, it’s worth mentioning that these metrics are just one part of the more robust training platform Zwift is building. You can see the pieces coming together: first, third-party workout syncing brought all the big training plan providers to the table. Then revamped automatic FTP detection made it easier to set your power zones. Next, Zwift added outdoor rides and began computing training metrics. Then run activities were added to the mix!
To what end? We don’t know for sure, but Zwift recently released Personalized Recommendations, and there’s much, much more that could be done in this space…
Did this post help you better understand and utilize Zwift’s Fitness Metrics? Still got questions? Comments? Share below!
Bluepoint Games was acquired only four years ago
Toy Fair 2026 just wrapped earlier this week and while I would have liked to spend even more time there, I have my own kids (and all their toys and trinkets) to look after. That said, there were a ton of cool new products on display at the Javits Center in New York City that set the stage for the rest of the year, so here’s a quick look at some of the most interesting releases from the largest toy show in the Western Hemisphere.
To celebrate the 40th anniversary of Transformers: The Movie, Hasbro is launching an apology tour to make up for traumatizing theatergoers with the death of the most beloved Autobot back in 1986. To kick things off, Hasbro is releasing a handful of new figures alongside re-releases for some popular bots including Astrotrain, Skywarp, Snarl and Shockwave. I want to give a special shout-out to the model for Kranix, which looks incredibly accurate, as if he just leapt off the movie screen. And even though his duck-billed spaceship alt-mode might look a bit awkward, I wouldn’t have it any other way.
The crown jewel of the line might be a near-life-size version of The Matrix of Leadership, which measures more than 15 inches wide and even plays Stan Bush’s iconic song “The Touch” with the push of a button. Unfortunately, the appeal of the Matrix is so powerful that it’s already sold out, including at third-party retailers like Big Bad Toy Store, which thankfully is still taking pre-orders for the rest of the lineup after the initial stock from Hasbro dried up.

Hot Wheels has big plans for 2026 including a new line of Pantone-colored cars, Brick Shop models like the Elite Series Aston Martin (which comes with its own 1:64 scale car) and a Monster Truck Mutant Chaos set with actual slime. However, I’d argue the company’s new F1 offerings are the cream of the crop. Not only are there a bunch of incredibly detailed 1:64 scale racecars with metal bodies, real rubber tires and accurate livery for all the big teams, there’s also a new Downhill Circuit Race course that comes with three official vehicles (Mercedes, Haas and Ferrari) featuring multiple levels and the ability to overtake or crash into other cars. If you’re like a lot of Americans who have recently fallen down the F1 rabbit hole due to Netflix’s Drive to Survive, these new officially licensed miniatures are sure to hit the spot.
The first five-pack set of cars is available now, with more arriving later this spring before the Downhill Circuit Race course drives by sometime this fall.

We’ve been eagerly awaiting the first batch of playsets featuring Lego’s nifty Smart Brick after it debuted at CES. But now that the company has detailed eight new sets featuring its latest innovation, we’re even more intrigued. For me, the three standout kits are the Millennium Falcon, Luke’s Red Five X-Wing and Darth Vader’s TIE fighter because acting out the Death Star trench run complete with reactive lights and sounds will never get old. I also have a soft spot for the Ewok minifigs that come with the AT-ST set. Alternatively, the Mos Eisley Cantina kit seems like a great way to highlight the smart brick’s ability to play music or kick out some rowdy droids. The one thing to look out for, though, is the tag on the set that says whether it’s Smart Play compatible or if it’s an all-in-one set, because the former will need Smart Bricks from other kits to deliver Lego’s newfound interactivity.
Pre-orders for these are live now, with sets slated to ship on March 1.

Rumi, Mira and Zoey may have been the biggest breakout stars of 2025 and Mattel is looking to keep that momentum going with a ton of new toys and figures for everyone’s favorite demon hunters. There are three new singing dolls that can belt out the trio’s hit “Golden” at the touch of a button and a deluxe figure of Rumi complete with her Four Tiger Sword. There are also a ton of other dolls and miniatures showcasing HUNTR/X, the Saja Boys and more. The one downside is that these products aren’t coming out until the fall, so you’ll have to tide yourself over with other K-pop-themed products for now.

Yoshi seems poised to steal the spotlight from Rosalina in the upcoming Super Mario Galaxy Movie and this release from Spin Masters is only reinforcing the lovable green dino’s aura. From inside his shell, Yoshi can burst out with his signature yell. After that, you can pat his nose to make his eyes light up or get him to rock when he’s really happy. But if you want one, you’re going to have to be vigilant. Pre-orders are already sold out, so you’ll need to keep a close eye on retailers like Walmart when he officially goes on sale on February 20.

Technically, these went on sale last month, but Thames & Kosmos’ SolarFlowers caught my eye again at Toy Fair due to their combination of art and science. Available in four different styles, each kit features a model that you can build yourself or with your kids (recommended age 8+) that turns into a lasting showpiece. After putting the kinetic sculpture together, you can connect the included solar panel to bring the whole kit to life (no batteries required) and make the flowers spin for perpetual entertainment.

As someone who grew up during the 80s and 90s, I’m trying to be optimistic about He-Man’s return to the big screen later this summer and Mattel’s new line of figures is certainly helping. To help prime people for the movie, there’s a big range of upcoming toys highlighting He-Man, Skeletor, Battle Cat and more, all of which I would have absolutely loved as a kid. Those will be available later this spring.

It’s hard to gauge the excitement of toys aimed at one-year-olds when they can’t read or get into Toy Fair. But as the parent of a toddler, I adore the partnership between Fisher-Price and Nintendo that has resulted in a line of Mario-themed Little People. All the big names are here, including Peach, Luigi and Bowser and there’s even a couple of super cute playsets to go with them. But perhaps the best part is that a six-pack of figures and Bower’s Airship costs under $25, which means your kid could be in for hours of fun without you spending a ton of money.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/here-are-my-favorite-things-from-toy-fair-2026-183356720.html?src=rss
Despite the popular notion that the modern economy runs around the clock, a new NBER working paper analyzing fifty years of U.S. labor data from 1973 to 2023 finds that Americans have been steadily and consistently moving away from evening and night work toward traditional daytime hours [PDF].
The share of the workforce on the job at 11PM, for instance, fell by over 25% from its 1970s level. Economists Jeff Biddle and Daniel Hamermesh argue the primary driver is rising real incomes — night work is essentially an inferior good that workers avoid as they earn more. The wage premium employers must pay for undesirable hours has grown by about three percentage points over the period.
One sector bucked the trend: retail, where the rise of big-box chains, 24-hour Walmart supercenters and overnight distribution center restocking pushed more employees into late-night and early-morning shifts. The Covid-era surge in telework, rather than spreading work across the day, actually accelerated the concentration into prime hours — especially among college-educated workers. France showed a similar pattern of daytime compression over 1966-2010, but the U.K. did not, likely because rapid de-unionization there eliminated the union wage premiums that had made night work comparatively attractive.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Ring CEO Jamie Siminoff has indicated that the company’s controversial Search Party feature might not always be just for lost dogs, according to emails obtained by 404 Media. A creepy surveillance tool being used to surveil. Who could have predicted that?
“I believe that the foundation we created with Search Party, first for finding dogs, will end up becoming one of the most important pieces of tech and innovation to truly unlock the impact of our mission,” Siminoff wrote in an email to staffers. “You can now see a future where we are able to zero out crime in neighborhoods. So many things to do to get there but for the first time ever we have the chance to fully complete what we started.”
The Ring<->Flock partnership is even worse than imagined, it was setup to be a AI powered mass surveillance system from the start. See this email from the Ring Founder, Jamie Siminoff (https://t.co/kLbZdR6Is1) pic.twitter.com/W9TFQpriRh
— Maricopa County Libertarian Party (@LPMaricopa) February 18, 2026
The words “zero out crime in neighborhoods” are particularly troubling. It is, however, worth noting that this is just an email and doesn’t necessarily indicate a plan by the company. Siminoff wrote the email back in October when Search Party first launched, which was months before the public backlash started. He did end the thread by noting he couldn’t “wait to show everyone else all the exciting things we are building over the years to come.”
One of those things could be the recently-launched “Familiar Faces” tool, which uses facial recognition to identify people that wander into the frame of a Ring camera. It seems to me that a combination of the Search Party tech, which uses the combined might of connected Ring cameras, with the Familiar Faces tech could make for a very powerful surveillance tool that excels at finding specific individuals.
Siminoff also suggested in an earlier email to staffers that Ring technology could have been used to catch Charlie Kirk’s killer by leveraging the company’s Community Requests feature. This is a tool that allows cops to ask camera owners for footage, thanks to a partnership with the police tech company Axon.
Here’s that Ring #SuperBowl commercial: pic.twitter.com/1gAxIJATdz
— philip lewis (@Phil_Lewis_) February 9, 2026
Ring had planned an expansion of this program via a partnership with a surveillance company called Flock Safety. The companies canceled this partnership after a Super Bowl ad spotlighting the Search Party tool triggered public outcry. Ring didn’t cite public sentiment for this decision, rather saying the integration would require “significantly more time and resources than anticipated.”
Ring has responded to 404 Media’s reporting, saying in an email that Search Party “does not process human biometrics or track people” and that “sharing has always been the camera owner’s choice.” This response did not provide any information as to what the future will hold for the company’s toolset.
The organization has been friendly with law enforcement since inception. “Our mission to reduce crime in neighborhoods has been at the core of everything we do at Ring,” founding chief Jamie Siminoff said when Amazon bought the company for $839 million back in 2018.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/ring-could-be-planning-to-expand-search-party-feature-beyond-dogs-175805706.html?src=rss
Also, we find out why Woody is back despite the end of Toy Story 4
Another day, another Google AI model. Google has really been pumping out new AI tools lately, having just released Gemini 3 in November. Today, it’s bumping the flagship model to version 3.1. The new Gemini 3.1 Pro is rolling out (in preview) for developers and consumers today with the promise of better problem-solving and reasoning capabilities.
Google announced improvements to its Deep Think tool last week, and apparently, the “core intelligence” behind that update was Gemini 3.1 Pro. As usual, Google’s latest model announcement comes with a plethora of benchmarks that show mostly modest improvements. In the popular Humanity’s Last Exam, which tests advanced domain-specific knowledge, Gemini 3.1 Pro scored a record 44.4 percent. Gemini 3 Pro managed 37.5 percent, while OpenAI’s GPT 5.2 got 34.5 percent.
YouTube’s “Ask” button is making its way to the living room. The Gemini-powered feature is now rolling out as an experiment on smart TVs, gaming consoles and streaming devices. 9to5Google first spotted a Google support page announcing the change.
Like on mobile devices and desktop, the feature is essentially a Gemini chatbot trained on each video’s content. Selecting that “Ask” button will bring up a series of canned prompts related to the content. Alternatively, you can use your microphone to ask questions about it in your own words.

Google says your TV remote’s microphone button (if it has one) will also activate the “Ask” feature. The company listed sample questions in its announcement, such as “what ingredients are they using for this recipe?” and “what’s the story behind this song’s lyrics?”
The conversational AI tool is only launching for “a small group of users” at first. Google promises that it will “keep everyone up to speed on any future expansions.”
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/youtube-is-bringing-the-gemini-powered-ask-button-to-tvs-173900295.html?src=rss
A new study [PDF] from Ramp’s economics lab has found that businesses are steadily replacing freelance workers hired through platforms like Upwork and Fiverr with AI tools from OpenAI and Anthropic, and the substitution is happening at a fraction of the cost.
The paper, authored by Ryan Stevens, Ramp’s Director of Applied Sciences, tracked firm-level spending data from Q3 2021 to Q3 2025 across thousands of companies on Ramp’s expense management platform. The share of total business spend going to online labor marketplaces fell from 0.66% in Q4 2021 to 0.14% in Q3 2025, while AI model provider spending rose from zero to 2.85% over the same period.
More than half the businesses that used freelance marketplaces in Q2 2022 had stopped entirely by Q2 2025. The cost dynamics are particularly notable. Firms most exposed to AI — those that historically spent the most on freelancers — substituted at a rate of roughly $1 in reduced freelance spend for every $0.03 in AI spend. A middle-exposure group showed a ratio of $1 to $0.30. The study uses a difference-in-differences design built around the launch of ChatGPT in October 2022 as a natural experiment. Stevens notes that micro-level substitution does not imply aggregate job loss, as demand for workers who build and maintain AI systems could grow faster than displacement.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Rivian suggests that vehicle owners can leave their phone at home (or perhaps in a glove box) and instead control some aspects of their EV using a new Apple Watch app. With a tap of your watch, you can unlock and lock the doors, sound the alarm and vent the windows. After the digital key is set up, R1S and R1T Gen 2 owners can unlock their vehicle automatically simply by walking up to it thanks to the passive car key feature.
It’s possible to set the cabin temperature and a target state of charge by turning the digital crown on an Apple Watch. You also can choose four quick controls to put front and center in the app and add a battery status indicator to your watch face if you so wish. Rivian says it will update its Apple Watch app with new features in the future.
Rivian first enabled digital car key support on Apple, Google Pixel and Samsung devices back in December. Apple started supporting digital car keys on iPhone and Apple Watch in 2020 and a boatload of automakers have adopted the tech.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/transportation/evs/rivian-rolls-out-an-apple-watch-app-with-vehicle-controls-and-digital-key-support-172642545.html?src=rss
PipeWire 1.6 multimedia framework adds an LDAC decoder, raises the maximum channel limit to 128, and delivers major audio and Bluetooth improvements.
A new industry report paints a harsh picture of gaming’s present challenges and future prospects for growth
At the start of the month, Elon Musk announced that two of his companies — SpaceX and xAI — were merging, and would jointly launch a constellation of 1 million satellites to operate as orbital data centers. Musk’s reputation might suggest otherwise, but according to experts, such a plan isn’t a complete fantasy. However, if executed at the scale suggested, some of them believe it would have devastating effects on the environment and the sustainability of low Earth Earth orbit.
Musk and others argue that putting data centers in space is practical given how much more efficient solar panels are away from Earth’s atmosphere. In space, there are no clouds or weather events to obscure the sun, and in the correct orbit, solar panels can collect sunlight through much of the day. In combination with declining rocket launch costs and the price of powering AI data centers on Earth, Musk has said that within three years space will be the cheapest way to generate AI compute power.
Ahead of the billionaire’s announcement, SpaceX filed an eight-page application with the Federal Communications Commission detailing his plan. The company hopes to deposit the satellites in this massive cluster in altitudes ranging between 500km and 2000km. They would communicate with one another and SpaceX’s Starlink constellation using laser “optical links.” Those Starlink satellites would then transmit inference requests to and from Earth. To power the entire effort, SpaceX has proposed putting the new constellation in sun-synchronous orbit, meaning the spacecraft would fly along the dividing line that separates the day and night sides of the planet.
Almost immediately the plan was greeted with skepticism. How would SpaceX, for instance, cool millions of GPUs in space? At first glance, that might seem like a weird point to get hung up on — much of space being around -450 Fahrenheit — but the reality is more complicated. In the near vacuum of space, the only way to dissipate heat is to slowly radiate it out, and in direct sunlight, objects can easily overheat. As one commenter on Hacker News succinctly put it, “a satellite is, if nothing else, a fantastic thermos.”
Scott Manley, who, before he created one of the most popular space-focused channels on YouTube, was a software engineer and studied computational physics and astronomy, argues SpaceX has already solved that problem at a smaller scale with Starlink. He points to the company’s latest V3 model, which has about 30 square meters of solar panels. “They have a bunch of electronics in the middle, which are taking that power and doing stuff with it. Now, some of that power is being beamed away as radio waves, but there’s a lot of thermal power that’s being generated and then having to be dissipated. So they already have a platform that’s running electronics off of power, and so it’s not a massive leap to turn into something doing compute.”
The larger V3 @Starlink satellites that will deploy from Starship will bring gigabit connectivity to users and are designed to add 60 Tera-bits-per-second of downlink capacity to the Starlink network.
That’s more than 20 times the capacity added with every V2 Mini launch on… pic.twitter.com/N0Vl9psbm3
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) October 13, 2025
Kevin Hicks, a former NASA systems engineer who worked on the Curiosity rover mission, is more skeptical. “Satellites with the primary goal of processing large amounts of compute requests would generate more heat than pretty much any other type of satellite,” he said. “Cooling them is another aspect of the design which is theoretically possible but would require a ton of extra work and complexity, and I have doubts about the durability of such a cooling system.”
What about radiation then? There’s a reason NASA relies on ancient hardware like the PowerPC 750 CPU found inside the Perseverance rover: Older chips feature larger transistors, making them more resilient to bit flips — errors in processing caused most often by cosmic radiation — that might scramble a computation. “Binary ones and zeroes are about the presence or absence of electrons, and the amount of charge required to represent a ‘one’ goes down as the transistors get smaller and smaller,” explains Benjamin Lee, professor of computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania. Space is full of energized particles traveling at incredible velocities, and the latest GPUs are built on the smallest, most advanced processing nodes to create transistor-dense silicon. Not a great combination.
“My concern about radiation is that we don’t know how many bit flips will occur when you deploy the most advanced chips and hundreds of gigabytes of memory up there,” said Professor Lee, pointing to preliminary research by Google on the subject. As part of Project Suncatcher, its own effort to explore the viability of space-based data centers, the company put one of its Trillium TPUs in front of a proton beam to bombard it with radiation. It found the silicon was “surprisingly radiation-hard for space applications.”
While those results were promising, Professor Lee points out we just don’t know how resilient GPUs are to radiation at this scale. “Even though modern computer architectures can detect and sometimes correct for those errors, having to do that again and again will slow down or add overhead to space-based computation,” he said.
Space engineer Andrew McCalip, who’s done a deep dive on the economics of orbital data centers, is more optimistic, pointing to the natural resilience of AI models. “They don’t require 100 percent perfect error-free runs. They’re inherently very noisy, very stochastic,” he explains, adding that part of the training for modern AI systems involves “injecting random noise into different layers.”
Even if SpaceX could harden its GPUs against radiation, the company would still lose satellites to GPUs that break down. If you know anything about data centers here on Earth, it’s that they require constant maintenance. Components like SSDs and GPUs die all the time. Musk has claimed SpaceX’s AI satellites would require “little” in the way of operating or maintenance costs. That’s only true if you accept the narrowest possible interpretation of what maintaining a fleet of AI satellites would entail.
“I think that there’s no case in which repair makes sense. It’s a fly till you die scenario,” says McCalip. From an economic perspective, McCalip argues the projected death rate of GPUs in space represents “one of the biggest uncertainties” of the orbital data center model. McCalip’s put that number at nine percent on the basis of a study Meta published following the release of its Llama 3 model (which, incidentally, measured hardware failures on Earth.) But the reality is no one knows what the attrition rate of those chips will be until they’re in space.
Orbital data centers also likely wouldn’t be a direct replacement for their terrestrial counterparts. SpaceX’s application specifically mentions inference as the primary use case for its new constellation. Inference is the practical side of running an AI system. It sees a model apply its learning to data it hasn’t seen before, like a prompt you write in ChatGPT, to make predictions and generate content. In other words, AI models would still need to be trained on Earth, and it’s not clear that the process could be offloaded to a constellation of satellites. “My initial thinking is that computations that require a lot of coordination, like AI training, may end up being tricky to get right at scale up there,” says Professor Lee.
In 1978, a pair of NASA scientists proposed a scenario where low Earth orbit could become so dense with space junk that collisions between those objects would begin to cascade. That scenario is known as Kessler syndrome.
One estimate from satellite tracking website Orbiting Now puts the number of objects in orbit around the planet at approximately 15,600. Another estimate from NASA suggests there are 45,000 human-made objects orbiting Earth. No matter the number, what’s currently in orbit represents a fraction of the 1 million additional satellites Musk wants to launch.
According to Aaron Boley, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of British Columbia and co-director of the Outer Space Institute, forward-looking modeling of Earth’s orbit above 700 kilometers — where part of SpaceX’s proposed cluster would live — suggests that area of space is already showing signs of Kessler syndrome.
While it takes less time for debris to clear in low Earth orbit, Professor Boley says there’s already enough material in that region of space where there could be a cascading effect from a major collision. Debris could, in a worst case scenario, take a decade to clear up. In turn, that could lead to disruptions in global communications, climate monitoring missions and more.
“You could get to the point where you’re just launching material in, and you could ask yourself how many satellites can I afford to lose? Can you reconstitute your constellation faster than you’re losing parts of it because of debris?” says Boley. “That’s a horrible future in terms of the environmental perspective” In particular, it would limit opportunities for humans to fly into low Earth orbit. “Could you operate in it? Yeah, but it would come with higher and higher costs,” adds Boley.
“The entire world is struggling with the problem of how we safely fly multiple mega constellations,” says Richard DalBello, who previously ran the Traffic Coordination System for Space (TraCSS) at the US Department of Commerce. Right now, there is no common global space situational awareness (SSA) system, and government and satellite operators are using uncoordinated national and commercial systems that are likely producing different results. At the start of the year, SpaceX lowered the orbit of thousands of Starlink satellites after one of them nearly collided with a Chinese satellite.
SpaceX has its own in-house SSA system called Stargaze, which it uses to fly its more than 7,000 Starlink satellites. According to DalBello, competing operators can receive SSA data from SpaceX, but to do so they must share their satellite position information. “Assuming data sharing, it is likely Stargaze can make an important contribution to spaceflight safety” says DalBello. “SpaceX is likely to have success with US and other commercial operators, but without the assistance of the federal government, other governments — particularly China — will likely be unwilling to share their satellite and SSA data.”
According to DalBello, the Biden administration was unable to make meaningful progress on the next-generation TraCSS system, in part because Congress was initially reluctant to fund the program. Meanwhile, the current Trump administration hasn’t shown interest in advancing the work that began during the president’s first term.
Even if the regulatory situation suddenly changes and the world’s governments agree on an international SSA system, SpaceX launching 1 million satellites along the day-night terminator would see the company effectively monopolize one of the Earth’s most valuable and important orbits. Professor Boley argues we should view our planet’s orbits as a resource that belongs to everyone. “Every time you put a satellite up, you use part of that resource. Now someone else can’t use it.”
And as Hicks points out, even a single cascade of colliding satellites would prevent that space from being used for scientific endeavors. “You would have to wait years for that debris to slowly come back into the atmosphere and burn up. In the meantime, that debris is taking up space that could be used for climate monitoring missions or any other types of missions that governments want to launch.”
Separately, the constant churn of Starship launches and re-entry of dead satellites would have a potentially dire impact on our planet’s atmosphere. “We’re not prepared for it,” Boley flatly says of the latter. “We’re not prepared for what’s happening now, and what’s happening now is already potentially bad.”
According to Musk’s “basic math,” SpaceX could add 100 gigawatts of AI compute capacity annually by launching a million tons of satellite per year. McCalip estimates a 100-gigawatt buildout alone would necessitate about 25,000 Starship flights.
Many of the metals found in satellites, including aluminum, magnesium and lithium, in combination with the exhaust rockets release into the atmosphere, can have complicated effects on the health of the planet. For instance, they can affect polar cloud formations, which in turn can facilitate ozone layer destruction through the chemical reactions that occur on their surfaces. According to Boley, the problem is we just don’t know how severe those environmental factors could become at the scale Musk has proposed, and SpaceX has provided us with precious few details on its mitigation plans. All it has said is that its plan would “achieve transformative cost and energy efficiency while significantly reducing the environmental impact associated with terrestrial data centers.”
Even if SpaceX could and does go out its way to mitigate the atmospheric effects of constant rocket flights, those spacecraft still need to be manufactured here on Earth. At one of his previous roles, Hicks studied rocket emissions and found the supply chains needed to build them produce an “order of magnitude” more carbon emissions than the rockets themselves.
SpaceX plans to fly its new satellites in a sun-synchronous orbit, meaning for much of the year, they’ll be sunlit. Each new Starlink generation has been larger and heavier than the one before it, with SpaceX stating in a recent filing that its upcoming V3 model could weigh up to 2,000 kilograms, up from the 575 kilograms of the V2 Mini Optimized. While we don’t know the exact dimensions of the company’s still-hypothetical AI satellites, they will almost certainly be bigger than their Starlink counterparts.
SpaceX has done more than most space operators to reduce the brightness of its satellites, but Professor Boley says he expects that this new constellation will be “strikingly bright” when moving through the night sky. In aggregate, he estimates they will almost certainly be harmful to scientific research here on Earth, limiting what terrestrial observatories can see.
“You’re going to see them with the naked eye. You’re going to see them with cameras. It’s going to be like living near an airport where you see all these things flying over just after sunset and the next couple of hours after sunset,” says Manley. “I don’t know if I want to have my entire sunset be just a band of satellites constantly shooting overhead.”
There are good reasons to make some spacecraft capable of doing AI inference. For instance, Professor Lee suggests it would make orbital imaging satellites more useful, as those spacecraft could do on-site analysis, instead of sending high-resolution files over long distances, saving time in the process. But the dose, as they say, makes the poison.
“There’s a lot of excitement about the many possibilities that can be brought to society and humanity through continued access to space, but the promise of prosperity is not permission to be reckless,” he says. “At this moment, we’re allowing that excitement to overtake that more measured progression […] those impacts don’t just impact outer space but Earth as well.”
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/orbital-ai-data-centers-could-work-but-they-might-ruin-earth-in-the-process-170000099.html?src=rss