Based on the Gemini release it’s hard to take what Google claims at face value.
Almost as bad as stuff branded IBM Watson for over promising
Google says AI weather model masters 15-day forecast
21–30 of 216 posts
Re: Google says AI weather model masters 15-day forecast
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
New model. Much better than the last one.
It's so new that it has no long term track record. I want to see how its record looks after say 1/3/5 years. Any 15 day forecast is just too far into the future for me to take seriously. Even the 3 day forecast is loose at best. By the time it reaches 7-10 days, some of the forecast is completely off when it reaches the 3 day window. "But DeepMind said GenCast surpassed the precision of the center's forecasts in more…
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Re: Google says AI weather model masters 15-day forecast
#23This 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.
do you want a causal weather model or one that can predict the weather well?
When climate change occurs (which it is), we're going to want a causal one so we can actually make a forecast instead of predicting only based on past (unchanged) data.
Re: Google says AI weather model masters 15-day forecast
#24I really wonder if, like the weather, we should see new financial prediction models, understanding that there is randomness but also patterns.
Re: Google says AI weather model masters 15-day forecast
#25This 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.
How many people can scrutinize the esoteric ensemble of climate models that existing climatologists use to generate weather predictions today?
The climatologists can, at least. Can they scrutinize the esoteric ensemble of weights making up this AI model? And which type of model's going to be easier to update based on changing climate parameters, a climate model or an AI model?
Re: Google says AI weather model masters 15-day forecast
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
do you want a causal weather model or one that can predict the weather well?
When climate change occurs (which it is), we're going to want a causal one so we can actually make a forecast instead of predicting only based on past (unchanged) data.
What does a causal weather model even mean?
Re: Google says AI weather model masters 15-day forecast
#27Obviously 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 maintain it's accuracy going forwards, but this seems like a promising sign that it should work as long as you keep updating the model.
Of course the "can compute weather in 8 minutes" thing doesn't include the ongoing training cost... so the "this is much cheaper to run" claim seems slightly suspect.
Re: Google says AI weather model masters 15-day forecast
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
When climate change occurs (which it is), we're going to want a causal one so we can actually make a forecast instead of predicting only based on past (unchanged) data.
What does a causal weather model even mean?
He meant one that is physically based and interpretable, rather than a black box based on pattern matching.
But I'll take the accurate black box any day, at least for weather forecasting. Climate modelling is a totally different thing.
Re: Google says AI weather model masters 15-day forecast
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's so new that it has no long term track record. I want to see how its record looks after say 1/3/5 years. Any 15 day forecast is just too far into the future for me to take seriously. Even the 3 day forecast is loose at best. By the time it reaches 7-10 days, some of the forecast is completely off when it reaches the 3 day window. "But DeepMind said GenCast surpassed the precision of the center's forecasts in more…
>Great, so it's using historical data to make a prediction about what has already happened. That's ok though because it doesn't know it's acting on old data. Researchers would give it data and ask for the 15 day forecast, the researchers then compare against that real world data. And as noted, "it surpassed the centres forecast in more than 97 percent" of those tests. This is all referred to as backtesting.
It's still not as good as actually new data. The individual model may not overfit the existing data, but the whole system of researchers trying lots of models, choosing the best ones, trying different hyperparameters etc. easily can.
Re: Google says AI weather model masters 15-day forecast
#30Based 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.
what about Google's flu prediction model release?
https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/pcph-blog/2018/01/23/google-flu-tren...