https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-86650-z
https://europepmc.org/article/ppr/ppr534649
Also some work on unsupervised change detection:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-19437-5
But there are undoubtedly lots of other people/companies/militaries exploring. We didn't build the hardware for example, and we weren't the only experiment onboard our flight. The main differentiator is how many have actually deployed in space. It's very easy to show that you can run a model on an accelerator, but getting it in-orbit somehow, testing it on real imagery from new sensors, etc. The challenge is that most people will have to train a model on simulated data, fly a cubesat or another small platform and then re-train their model to adapt to images from orbital images. Aerial imagery models don't always transfer well to satellite images.
My take having been to conferences, and speaking to others in the field, is that there are a lot more researchers interested (as of 2022) and we'll start to see more publicly deployed experiments in the next year or two.
So, is this cubesat 99% thermal control radiators or what?
As others have said though, and as your "extreme transistor density" points to, high heat dissipation & energy usage are absolutely very real factors here. Still, Coral, back in 2017, was a half watt 2tflops inference engine, on a non-cutting-edge (at the time) process.
Starlink pioneered this. Redundant COTS almost always beats rad hardening, particularly in LEO.
The article’s point is this will soon be obsolete. Processing at the edge is enormously costly.
It’s a good idea, and I bet folks like Cloudflare that already operate Edge Compute platforms will have a head-start here.
After that, networking is well understood.
Edge compute isn't solved; it's an area under active and aggressive development. The Cloudflare Workers wasm runtime for example. And if you're selling satelite edge compute, what's your control plane? You need a config store etc.
Put differently; if I'm a satelite operator writing first-party software to run on my satelites, sure, there's no framework code to write, and I can just tailor the software to my satelite platform's hardware. However, if I'm selling colocated compute with ultra-low latency to third parties, then I need to build something that (IMO) looks very close, if not identical, to a current-generation edge-compute platform.
As always, finding a system that is affordable and radiation tolerant is the problem.
Full disclaimer I had some code of mine and a paper that I'm not linking.
But yeah, seems like interoperable space protocols are starting up. BACN-Mesh works. Maybe not quite so important & I forget the name but I feel like there were some command protocols starting to emerge into semi-standard form as well.