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Launch HN: Silurian (YC S24) – Simulate the Earth

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71–80 of 156 posts

Re: Launch HN: Silurian (YC S24) – Simulate the Earth

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

something within the interface that more clearly illustrates their product differentiation. nullschool is obscure enough to the general audience that when I saw it there was an immediate red flag. If only specialized scientists can see the difference between the sites, it's a presentation problem.

The interface in question is the second link in the post. To get to the interface without any of the other relevant context, you would have to: - skip reading the post (which explains all of this) - skip the first link in the post (which explains all of this) - go straight to the second link in the post, to the interface - skip the "about" link in the interface (which explains all of this)

Obviously nobody did that.

The post has been edited.

Re: Launch HN: Silurian (YC S24) – Simulate the Earth

#72

So ChatGPT has a cutoff date on the stuff it can talk about. This predicting weather sounds like ChatGPT being able to predict next week's news from which it has been trained on. I can see how it can probably predict some stuff like Argentina winning a football match scheduled for next week when played against India given India sucks at football. But can it really give any useful predictions? Like can it predict thin…

Our training cutoff date was the end of 2022. Here's our blogpost on the 2024 hurricane season https://silurian.ai/posts/001/hurricane_tracks

Re: Launch HN: Silurian (YC S24) – Simulate the Earth

#73

So ChatGPT has a cutoff date on the stuff it can talk about. This predicting weather sounds like ChatGPT being able to predict next week's news from which it has been trained on. I can see how it can probably predict some stuff like Argentina winning a football match scheduled for next week when played against India given India sucks at football. But can it really give any useful predictions? Like can it predict thin…

In India we use Natural Intelligence - Astrology - for predicting results. Note that it has high percentage of hallucinations.

Re: Launch HN: Silurian (YC S24) – Simulate the Earth

#74

How performed your Hurricanes forecast versus the reality?

We explored several examples from the 2024 hurricane season in our blog post: https://silurian.ai/posts/001/hurricane_tracks . We overlaid the true paths of the hurricane over our predictions for everyone to see!

I'm finding the posts confusing -- is the prediction the images?

What exactly is predicted and what is the actual path in those videos?

Re: Launch HN: Silurian (YC S24) – Simulate the Earth

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A ripoff of the visualization layer? Even if it was, who cares? That's not the work. What's next, you think a new chess engine is a ripoff because they use a standard chess board for visualization? A new protein prediction model is a ripoff because they use the standard visualization?

There's a long precedent of knockoffs, scams, and skullduggery in silicon valley.

The answer isn't to not even read what they are doing and just assume the worst.

Re: Launch HN: Silurian (YC S24) – Simulate the Earth

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a long precedent of knockoffs, scams, and skullduggery in silicon valley.

The answer isn't to not even read what they are doing and just assume the worst.

They edited the post.

Regardless, you're just trying to personally attack me. That's a great use of both our time.

Re: Launch HN: Silurian (YC S24) – Simulate the Earth

#77
post #55

Does anyone predict economy/population/... by simulating individual people based on real census information? Monte carlo simulation of major events (births, death, ...) based on known statistics based on age, economic background, location, education, profession, etc.? It seems there are not that many people that this would be computationally infeasible, and states and companies have plenty of data to feed into such s…

I've done a lot of advanced research in this domain. It is far more difficult than people expect for a few reasons.

The biggest issue is that the basic data model for population behavior is a sparse metastable graph with many non-linearities. How to even represent these types of data models at scale is a set of open problem in computer science. Using existing "big data" platforms is completely intractable, they are incapable of expressing what is needed. These data models also tend to be quite large, 10s of PB at a bare minimum.

You cannot use population aggregates like census data. Doing so produces poor models that don't ground truth in practice for reasons that are generally understood. It requires having distinct behavioral models of every entity in the simulation i.e. a basic behavioral profile of every person. It is very difficult to get entity data sufficient to produce a usable model. Think privileged telemetry from mobile carrier backbones at country scales (which is a lot of data -- this can get into petabytes per day for large countries).

Current AI tech is famously bad at these types of problems. There is an entire set of open problems here around machine learning and analytic algorithms that you would need to research and develop. There is negligible literature around it. You can't just throw tensorflow or LLMs at the problem.

This is all doable in principle, it is just extremely difficult technically. I will say that if you can demonstrably address all of the practical and theoretical computer science problems at scale, gaining access to the required data becomes much less of a problem.

Re: Launch HN: Silurian (YC S24) – Simulate the Earth

#78

> Silurian builds foundation models to simulate the Earth, starting with the weather. What else do you hope to simulate, if this becomes successful?

The actual killer thing would be flooding. Insurance has invested billions into trying to simulate risk here and models are still relatively weak.

Wildfire would be a huge deal for insurance as well.

Re: Launch HN: Silurian (YC S24) – Simulate the Earth

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answer isn't to not even read what they are doing and just assume the worst.

They edited the post. Regardless, you're just trying to personally attack me. That's a great use of both our time.

It was rhetorical. And telling you that the answer is not to assume the worst without reading what they are doing is not a personal attack.

You are out here implying these guys are a fraud. Being told to pull your head in is not personal.

Re: Launch HN: Silurian (YC S24) – Simulate the Earth

#80

Are you planning on open sourcing your code and/or model weights? Aurora code and weights were recently open sourced.

Not immediately, but we will consider open sourcing some of our future work. At least, we definitely plan to be very open with our metrics and how well (or bad) our models are doing.
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