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Google says AI weather model masters 15-day forecast

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Re: Google says AI weather model masters 15-day forecast

#31

Post by atonse »

CabSauce wrote: post #8
atonse wrote: post #7

This is great from a practical standpoint (being able to predict weather), but does it actually improve our understanding of the weather, or WHY those predictions are better? That is my issue with some of these AI advances. With these, we won't have actually gotten better at understanding the weather patterns, since it's all just a bunch of weights which nobody really understands.

But that's the point of a weather forecast. We don't do them for the science. (I'm not arguing against weather research.)

I would think we also use these models to run simulations. So maybe the AI models can be used to run simulations with different kinds of inputs to see if doing X in one place (like planting a lot of trees in one area) will have an outsized impact rather than doing Y in another place.

Re: Google says AI weather model masters 15-day forecast

#32

Post by moralestapia »

amazingamazing wrote: post #20
Always42 wrote: post #15

Based on the Gemini release it’s hard to take what Google claims at face value.

Totally different constraints. It’s like saying Nobel prize winning physicists can’t be trusted because they get basic arithmetic wrong Gemini is fast food - it’s not supposed to be the best.

Your analogy doesn't make sense.

Nobel winning physicists can definitely perform arithmetic.

Re: Google says AI weather model masters 15-day forecast

#33

Post by yunwal »

sgt101 wrote: post #13
atonse wrote: post #7

This is great from a practical standpoint (being able to predict weather), but does it actually improve our understanding of the weather, or WHY those predictions are better? That is my issue with some of these AI advances. With these, we won't have actually gotten better at understanding the weather patterns, since it's all just a bunch of weights which nobody really understands.

whelp... Ok, how would you articulate an understanding of how the weather works? Let's face it, it's not going to be easy to frame in natural language...

You can take a meteorology course that explains how the weather works. That course is the articulation.

Re: Google says AI weather model masters 15-day forecast

#35

Post by zaptheimpaler »

atonse wrote: post #7

This is great from a practical standpoint (being able to predict weather), but does it actually improve our understanding of the weather, or WHY those predictions are better? That is my issue with some of these AI advances. With these, we won't have actually gotten better at understanding the weather patterns, since it's all just a bunch of weights which nobody really understands.

I think this will be the next generation of science to some extent. The things we can understand and call explanations/reasons might be something involving 5 or 50 variables with not too many interactions between them. They have some unifying principles or equations we can fit in our head. I think many things inherently just involve far too many variables and complexity for us to understand in a neat theory and we are hitting those limits in biology & physics. Even so I'm sure we will develop better and better ways to interpret these models and get some level of understanding. Maybe we can understand them but not create them past a certain scale.

Re: Google says AI weather model masters 15-day forecast

#36

Post by rurp »

amazingamazing wrote: post #20
Always42 wrote: post #15

Based on the Gemini release it’s hard to take what Google claims at face value.

Totally different constraints. It’s like saying Nobel prize winning physicists can’t be trusted because they get basic arithmetic wrong Gemini is fast food - it’s not supposed to be the best.

A Nobel physicist that couldn't do basic arithmetic would definitely raise my eyebrows, but even taking your analogy at face value Gemini was not marketed as fast food slop. Google can't be trusted to hype products in a reliable way, regardless of their technical details.

Re: Google says AI weather model masters 15-day forecast

#37

Post by lispisok »

gpm wrote: post #27
bad_haircut72 wrote: post #5

Obviously this team knows way more about this donain than me but I have to ask, wouldnt this only be able to predict weather which is in line with past weather patterns/indicators? I can imagine a weather analyst might be able to see "between the data" and recognise when some anomaly might be brewing, but an AI model would not

> But DeepMind said GenCast surpassed the precision of the center's forecasts in more than 97 percent of the 1,320 real-world scenarios from 2019 which they were both tested on. > The model was trained on four decades of temperature, wind speed and air pressure data from 1979 to 2018 The test set is taken from after the training set. I agree it seems likely that it will need to be continuously trained on new data to…

It's much cheaper to run for Google as long as the ECMWF keeps cranking reanalysis for training data and keep generating new initial conditions for forecasts which are generated by combining new observations and the previous forecast generated by the ECMWF physical models which is not cheap to do.

Re: Google says AI weather model masters 15-day forecast

#38

Post by wcoenen »

mjburgess wrote: post #6
bad_haircut72 wrote: post #5

Obviously this team knows way more about this donain than me but I have to ask, wouldnt this only be able to predict weather which is in line with past weather patterns/indicators? I can imagine a weather analyst might be able to see "between the data" and recognise when some anomaly might be brewing, but an AI model would not

Yup. There's fundamentally no way to automatically verify predictive accuracy, the assumptions in ML papers about such accuracy is (the almost always false presumption) that there are no distributional shifts in the data generating process. Here, since weather certainly changes its fundamental patterns over time, there is no way of reliably predicting out-sample performance. It's highly likely that in 1-2 years time…

Weather models can't compute some of the important physics that happens at sub-grid scale, and use various tricks to deal with that. How sure are you that these traditional models aren't also heavily tuned on past data to maximize performance? Perhaps they will also perform badly "out of distribution".
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