AI Agents Now Steer SETI's Allen Telescope Array in Search for Alien Signals

The system was built by Breakthrough Listen and the SETI Institute. According to Nvidia, a researcher can make a single natural-language request and the agents will point the array's antennas, calibrate and focus the instrument, correct errors in the data and plot the results. The Decoder reported that researchers still type in the commands for now.

The software stack is built on Nvidia's Holoscan sensor-processing platform. A Holoscan library called DAQIRI moves data from the antennas directly into GPU memory, so it is processed as it arrives instead of being stored first. Nvidia says the setup handles up to 2.4 terabits per second on its RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell GPUs. According to the team, work that used to take weeks can now be finished in hours.

One early result, the team says, is the first real-time AI detection of a pulsar in the Crab Nebula. Pulsars are rapidly spinning remnants of dead stars that emit regular pulses, which makes them useful for testing signal detection.

Inference runs on site, next to the instrument. The researchers are testing open models, including Nvidia's Nemotron, that can run locally where keeping data close and getting quick results matter most. Nvidia said the team has in mind observatories that might one day operate offline on the far side of the Moon.

Andrew Siemion, who holds the Bernard M. Oliver chair for SETI at the SETI Institute and is principal investigator of Breakthrough Listen, called the work "a breakthrough in translation". He said that whatever agentic observatories find "may have much more in common with themselves than with the humans who created them."

The performance figures come from Nvidia and the research team and have not been independently verified. The project is also an example of agentic AI moving into the running of scientific instruments, beyond software tasks. Whether it will find anything is another matter: searches for signals from extraterrestrial intelligence have run since 1960 without a confirmed detection.