Frontier models can't run on satellites. Here's an end-to-end wildfire detection pipeline using a 450M on-board Vision-Language Model (Sentinel-2 + LFM2.5-VL)

Sharing a project I've been building: a full end-to-end wildfire prevention pipeline that runs a Vision-Language Model directly on a satellite, using Sentinel-2 imagery. The interesting design constraint isn't model quality. It's bandwidth. A frontier model on the ground means downlinking massive multispectral image matrices per orbit, which doesn't scale. A 450M VLM small enough to run on-board flips it: do inference in space, downlink only the JSON risk profile. The pipeline pairs RGB (B4-B3-B2) with SWIR (B12-B8-B4) tiles. SWIR is the key signal.