PATRICK TUCKER
Satellite image providers say that new artificial intelligence tools, coupled with more and faster satellite data, will enable image providers to much better anticipate events of geopolitical significance and notify customers and operators of impending crises.
“Analysis is really great, but it's mainly retroactive, a forensic capability of looking back in time,” Planet CEO William Marshall said in an interview last week. “In principle, generative AI models…can leverage satellite data to predict what is likely to happen: ‘You're likely to have a drought here that might lead to civil unrest.’”
Today, relatively simple AI processes such as machine learning can pick out things like cars or ships, but identifying trends across large amounts of imagery remains a heavily human endeavor. Analysis of some image sets—say, to understand where an adversary force might attempt to stage an invasion—can take months.
Planet, whose satellite imagery helped the world understand the preparations for and execution of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, has long experimented with various artificial intelligence models. But Marshall said that recent breakthroughs in large language models promise to enable AI to do more and more complex analysis—and far faster than humans.
“We're going with these large language models, I think is more and more towards getting that sort of accuracy within minutes or so—if you've already got the imagery,” he said.
Troy Tomon, Planet’s senior vice president of product and software engineering, said models can be trained not just to make sense of a given data set but to help humans find data relevant to their problems.
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