BetaEarth: Open Embeddings of Sentinel-2 and Sentinel-1 with a Little Help of AlphaEarth

Satellite image deep learning · Apr 29, 2026 · 26m · transcript

In this episode I sat down with Mikolaj (Miko) Czerkawski from Asterisk Labs to explore BetaEarth, an experimental open-source emulator trained on AlphaEarth Foundations' public embedding archive. AEF — released by Google and Google DeepMind as a global 10 m embedding product derived from a wide range of Earth-observation modalities — is what makes BetaEarth possible: its openness lets the community build lightweight independent emulators that approximate AEF's pixelwise outputs from standard Sentinel inputs, and use them to probe how much of a model's behaviour is captured in its public…