During a conversation at Los Alamos labs in 1950, physicist Enrico Fermi famously asked why, if the universe is so large, we have never seen any signs of extraterrestrial life. Well, maybe we just needed some GPUs.
There is now so much data streaming in from powerful telescopes like the James Webb that it is impossible for humans to parse through it in a reasonable amount of time. Scientists are using Nvidia GPUs to examine the data and regularly discovering the oldest galaxies in the universe.
UC Santa Cruz astrophysicist Brant Robertson told TechCrunch his team is now using transformer architecture — like the models that power large language models — to expand the capabilities of AI and find the hidden galaxies among the blurry, pixelated images that come in among gigabytes of data each day.
The tech can also render some impressive imagery of distant galaxies that would otherwise be invisible to the human eye. There are still no signs of intelligent life in distant galaxies, but with a little more compute power, who knows what we might find?