How a rocket scientist turned entrepreneur created the "ChatGPT for Earth data" using transformers and satellite imagery.

Bruno Sánchez is a rocket scientist with a somewhat deviant trajectory. An astrophysicist by training, he used the tools of his trade - mathematics and science - at the broadest possible scale: the universe. At some point, however, his focus switched to using those same tools for more down to earth goals.

Sánchez had a stint at the World Bank, where as a member of interdisciplinary teams he helped make sense of geospatial data. Then he realized the core of what he was doing was mapping, which prompted him to launch a company called Mapbox, providing online maps on the web.

This experience brought another realization for Sánchez - that we have so much data about Earth that we don't really know how to use it: "We know what are the trees in the world. We know what are the forests in the world. It's just a matter of processing [data] properly", as he put it.

So when he got the opportunity to attempt to put all of that together in the same data center and in one workbench, he went for it. That was the Planetary Computer project at Microsoft, and Sánchez loved it. Then, ChatGPT happened.

Sánchez noted that the T in ChatGPT - the transformer - was an architecture that seemed to work great for modalities such as text, images, and audio, but no one seemed to be using it for earth data. So he decided to give it a try. He built a team, raised funds, created a non-profit, and built an open source model using open data. And this is how Clay was born.

Read the article published on Orchestrate all the Things here: https://linkeddataorchestration.com/2025/06/11/building-ai-for-earth-with-clay-the-intelligence-platform-transforming-geospatial-data-analysis/