NASA is planning to help astronauts using AI-powered assistant

NASA is claimed to be developing a ChatGPT-like AI assistant to assist astronauts in the field. The AI could detect glitches and “inefficiencies” as they occur, and allow users to talk to the spacecraft itself.

AI is all the rage, not only for big tech companies like Microsoft and Google, but also for NASA. Models like Bing Chat and OpenAI’s GPT-4 offer incredibly human-like interactions, and now they’re being implemented into phones, cars, and now space stations.

As reported by The Guardian, Dr Larissa Suzuki, a visiting researcher at NASA claims that an AI assistant will allow astronauts to essentially talk to the spacecraft themselves, and offer an AI-powered interface where the AI is able to detect any potential crucial aberrations.

“It then alerts mission operators that there is a likelihood that package transmissions from space vehicle X will be lost or will fail delivery,” “We cannot send an engineer up in space whenever a space vehicle goes offline or its software breaks somehow.”

NASA looks to decouple AI from supercomputers

It sounds like something out of science fiction, but is now becoming a reality. The AI is due to be deployed on Lunar Gateway, a planned space station. Suzuki is also working on how to deploy AI without reliance on supercomputers, such as Nvidia’s behemoths, which have since catapulted the company into trillion-dollar territory.

Suzuki states that they are working on an alternative approach named federated learning, which would allow a fleet of rovers to share knowledge between themselves, without having to send data back to Earth immediately.

“The spacecraft do collaborative updates based on what’s seen by other spacecraft,” she said. “It’s a technique to do distributed learning – to learn in a collaborative way without … bringing all that data to the ground.”

Saving the amount of data that the system would have to bring back down to Earth would be beneficial for obvious reasons. However, it’s also important to note that a system might still have to be in place for the data to be stored locally on a space station itself.

Regardless, it’s an incredibly interesting time for technology, as AI continues to sweep through and touch almost all aspects of the tech industry as a whole.