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Posted by bhavansig 9 hours ago

DeepMind's WeatherNext model achieves breakthrough forecasting cyclones(deepmind.google)
280 points | 87 commentspage 2
ycui7 1 hour ago|
on one side, deepmind makes a lot of advancement in science related application. but, on the commercial side, they struggle to compete with other major LLM providers.
PunchTornado 1 hour ago|
which for google shareholders is pretty bad. we don't get anything from them releasing this.
snake_doc 5 hours ago||
> We can now generate a single 15-day forecast in less than a minute on a TPU, empowering forecasters to quickly evaluate the probability distribution of potentially devastating tail-risks.

Crazy

derbOac 5 hours ago|
"This has surprised scientists, and it remains an open research question to fully understand how our models produce such accurate predictions at this resolution."

Also crazy.

Seems important to understand why something does what it does, in the very least to know when it might not?

alpaca9 4 hours ago||
You can't, and it's one of the biggest problems when trying to use AI for anything.
ronnieron 2 hours ago||
SOTA to be abandoned for something that makes money.
_alternator_ 5 hours ago||
Accurate weather forecasting has been one of the major achievements of the 20th and 21st century. Computing power is a central piece of this story, but it's also important to remember that the government infrastructure in place to collect ground-truth current weather data is utterly critical to these model's successes. From launching weather balloons to running global weather-monitoring satellites, the scientists and systems at NOAA/NWS (and in this case, the UK counterparts) provide critical expertise and data.

I say this because it seems that earlier announcements where industrial deep neural nets "outperformed NOAA" likely encouraged the slash-and-burn Trump administration in its gutting of critical activities and centers of expertise at NOAA. The impression that industry can predict weather better than the government agencies totally misses that the industrial models utterly rely on government data for inputs. In fact, almost all weather reports you see---weather.com, TV, etc.---are just lightly repackaged products that NOAA provides for free on weather.gov (which you can access for free without ads).

moktonar 6 hours ago||
They should try to forecast earthquakes, that would really be a breakthrough If anything better than random comes out
mattlondon 5 hours ago||
Google has the early warning system that gives people maybe 20-30s to e.g. turn off gas, stop vehicles, get under something solid. There was a lot of news recently about how this saved many thousands of lives in Venezuela I think it was.

But hey let's all keep shitting on Google because their coding agent is slightly worse than SOTA.

phoghed 5 hours ago|||
> But hey let's all keep shitting on Google because their coding agent is slightly worse than SOTA.

Reminder, we can do two or even more things. In fact, we can even simultaneously hold contradictory opinions.

concinds 2 hours ago||||
And it's been built into every Android phone for years, for free. While Apple is still completely Missing In Action.
Aboutplants 5 hours ago||||
This needs to be tied to a whole house shutoff system because if I get an alert I’m not thinking about shutting off my gas or water. Having a system that shut those off immediately would be great
SubiculumCode 3 hours ago|||
I don't think the parent was shitting on Google
cossatot 4 hours ago|||
Forecasting earthquakes via ML should be possible but is very strongly limited by data. We have ~50 years of reasonably good seismological catalogs for most of the world. The seismic cycle (the sequence of major earthquake, reloading, major earthquake on a single section of fault) is generally thousands of years except at the fastest-slipping faults. There are very few sections of faults where we have seismological observations of multiple events, and for >90% of faults, we don't even know when the last earthquake was. There are geologic methods to help with this, but they are labor intensive and often yield error bars of hundreds to thousands of years, because the earthquakes don't produce radiocarbon signatures directly; the geologists use e.g. charcoal older and younger layers as available to bracket the timing, and many faults do not have suitable geologic sites to preserve the earthquake deformation and bracket the timing.

I do think it's possible that thorough exploration of the data that do exist can yield broader patterns that apply to many regions, but earthquake behavior has a lot of complexities and different fault systems may behave differently.

A lot of the hope is for coupling physical simulators to ML and the existing datasets to better understand the physics and then work from there, but this is typically cutting-edge HPC work, which limits the pace of research and the number of researchers.

SubiculumCode 3 hours ago||
You seem to know much more about this topic than I do, and your assessment agrees with mine. Predicting rare and sudden events is a very difficult modeling problem generally, and the data limitations is real. I agree that it will probably need to come from coupling of ML with physical simulators plus more extensive 3D map data on force vectors, material properties, etc.
talon8635 5 hours ago|||
This was my immediate hope too, as fault line resident
Yokolos 5 hours ago||
Is this even feasible with our current sensor data?
pingou 6 hours ago||
It seems especially useful for cargo ships, with better predictions they could save some fuel and be safer.
embedding-shape 6 hours ago|
Wake me up once commercial airplanes can take advantage of this and take us across the Atlantic in less than 5 hours.
fallingbananna 5 hours ago|||
I don't mean to be disrespectful... but, why would you consider tech intended to save lives and resources less of a deal, than slightly faster flights over the Atlantic?
embedding-shape 3 hours ago||
No disrespect taken :) It was (obviously) a joke, I'm not seriously waiting for us to hurl airplanes through cyclones to make air travel faster.
notfromhere 5 hours ago|||
planes fly above the weather, so kinda irrelevant. you can cross the atlantic fast with something like the Concorde
embedding-shape 5 hours ago||
Well, that explains why even cyclones don't make us faster!

Obviously the technology I'm talking about would involve the planes going into the cyclone so plane can go faster.

noduerme 4 hours ago||
Ask Gemini why google maps doesn't have a weather layer. Its justifications are defensive rubbish, even for Gemini.
HardCodedBias 3 hours ago||
And this is why GDM has to go. It's crazy that when Google is struggling so badly that efforts like this that have no path to revenue at all were funded.

GDM management really thought that they were some kind of charity. UNREAL.

vickychijwani 1 hour ago||
Are you being sarcastic? Even if “Google is struggling so badly” (which it really is not - the narrative will flip again at some point), these efforts will have a lasting impact on the world. Not everything good is about bringing in revenue.
PunchTornado 56 minutes ago||
shareholders are pretty unhappy about demis. think about alphafold. huge investments from the company, tens of billions. at a critical time. and absolutely 0 revenue. it got demis a nobel though. as a shareholder you'd be unhappy too.
PunchTornado 58 minutes ago||
i feel you. as a google shareholder i am disappointed too.
pbronez 4 hours ago|
Cool how they integrated both huge machine-scale data and smaller human-curated data for this project.

> The model was co-trained on two distinct data modalities: global weather dynamics and expert-curated historical cyclone observations. By training end-to-end on nearly 20 terabytes of global atmospheric data and the historical IBTrACS database spanning nearly 5,000 historical storms, the model learns complex atmospheric patterns and how to model extreme weather.

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