Will Marshall

speaker

244 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 31 Jul

Will Marshall’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.

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Freakonomics Radio · 683. In the New Space Race, Who Makes the Rules? · 31 Jul 2026 podcast

A farmer starts asking about farming for their field in ChatGVT.

It's going to tell them all about the theory of agricultural science, about crop science and all this sort of stuff, but it's going to know nothing about that person's field today, what the conditions are and what they could do better.

Well, there's all these physical world data sets, but perhaps one of the core things,

is Earth data.

Landsat in 1972 started imaging the whole planet every month and has done for the last 50 years.

Planet in the last 10 years has been imaging the whole Earth at three meter resolution every single day.

Both those systems together have about 5,000 images of the whole landmass of the Earth documenting change over time.

Imagine adding all of that to these LLMs so that they have all that knowledge of

agronomy and glaciology, but they also have literal understanding of what's going on in space and time day to day.

So then the farmer asked that question and they can say, well, your field's doing this.

It's got blight in this corner.

The next door neighbor farmer did this and they did better yield last year after they had done this intervention.

Why don't you do that?

And interestingly, all the AI leaders have been talking recently about physical models, trying to build AI to have understanding of the physical world.

And of course, AI is only as good as its training data.

And here we sit in the space community with a whole ton of data about the physical world, you know.

And it's not just satellite data.

It's sensors all around the place.

But Earth data is, if you like, the Wikipedia for this next phase.

It's the foundation data set that will enable us to then answer questions about the physical world, about those fires, that's farming, that's insurance, that's so on.

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