Creon Levit | AI for Satellite Imaging @ Vision Weekend USA 2025
•February 5, 2026
0
Why It Matters
The platform turns petabytes of daily satellite imagery into real‑time, queryable intelligence, giving decision‑makers unprecedented speed and precision for monitoring global change.
Key Takeaways
- •Planet Labs operates 200‑plus daily‑imaging satellites, capturing 90% land.
- •System ingests ~20 TB of imagery daily, generating 260 M tiles.
- •AI pipeline embeds tiles, enabling one‑second global change queries.
- •Multimodal LLMs and vector search power queryable planet demos.
- •Users can locate construction, cooling towers, and other changes instantly.
Summary
Creon Levit, senior engineer at Planet Labs, presented the company’s AI‑driven Earth observation platform at Vision Weekend USA 2025, outlining the transition from its original daily‑coverage mission to a new “queryable planet” service that lets users ask natural‑language questions about the planet.
Planet Labs now operates more than 200 imaging satellites that capture roughly 90 % of the world’s land each day, downlinking about 20 TB of eight‑band, 4‑meter resolution imagery. The data are sliced into 256‑pixel tiles, producing roughly 260 million tiles per day, each embedded into a vector space using multiple multimodal large language models.
The embedded tiles are stored in a vector database and combined with text‑to‑image embeddings, enabling one‑second global searches for change between two dates. Live demos showed the system locating construction sites, highway interchanges, and cooling towers after only a few relevance‑feedback clicks, and even linking to Planet’s chat interface for additional context.
By turning raw satellite data into an instantly searchable knowledge base, Planet Labs offers governments, utilities, and enterprises a rapid way to monitor infrastructure, assess environmental impacts, and respond to emerging events, potentially reshaping the economics of Earth‑observation analytics.
Original Description
Vision Weekends are our flagship conference series, bringing together leading scientists, entrepreneurs, funders, and policymakers to explore frontier science and technology and to imagine paths toward flourishing futures.
This playlist features seminars and fireside chats from Vision Weekend USA, held December 5–7, 2025 in the Bay Area. Join for big ideas at the cutting edge of science and technology, in-depth conversations with leading experts, curated one-on-one meetings, tech demos, unconference sessions, mentorship hours, and a $10k project pitch competition. Stay for the community and the experience: lab tours, satellite events, biohacking sessions, a cypherpunk party, and surprise moments across iconic Bay Area locations.
══════════════════════════════════════
About The Foresight Institute
The Foresight Institute is a research organization and non-profit that supports the development of high-impact technologies. Since our founding in 1986 on a vision of guiding powerful technologies, we have continued to evolve into a many-armed organization that focuses on several fields of science and technology that are too ambitious for legacy institutions to support. From molecular nanotechnology, to brain-computer interfaces, space exploration, cryptocommerce, and AI, Foresight gathers leading minds to advance research and accelerate progress.
We are entirely funded by your donations. If you enjoy what we do please consider donating through our donation page: https://foresight.org/donate/
0
Comments
Want to join the conversation?
Loading comments...