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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

#211

I don’t really understand why Google and other companies making similar models are able to train on existing modelled or reanalysis data sets and then claim further accuracy than the originals. Sure, stacks of convolutions with multimodal attention blocks should be able to tease apart all the of idiosyncratic correlations that the original models may not have seen. But it’s unclear to me that better models is the dir…

> The model was trained on four decades of temperature, wind speed and air pressure data from 1979 to 2018 and can produce a 15-day forecast in just eight minutes—compared to the hours it currently takes. Basically, they trained the model on old observations, not old predictions. IE, imagine someone created a giant spreadsheet of every temperature observation, windspeed observation, precipitation observation, ect, an…

From the paper:

> GenCast is trained on 40 years of best-estimate analysis from 1979 to 2018, taken from the publicly available ERA5 (fifth generation ECMWF reanalysis) reanalysis dataset

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08252-9

They say they trained on era5 data. That is modeled data not only direct observations. They do it this way to have a complete global data set that is consistent in time and space.

https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/datasets/reanalysis-era5-s...

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

#212
post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blaming climate change on AI seems like a stretch

That’s not what I said, and taking the argument in good faith would make it obvious. Of course AI isn’t to blame for climate change, it started way before this craze and there isn’t one single culprit. But the energy consumption doesn’t help, and burning more fossil fuels to power this energy-hungry systems makes it worse, that’s the point. https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366592778/Microsoft-and-...

i think the point is that we have to pick and choose our battles, everything has an impact, but i think the impact of AI in terms of positives has incredible, massive upside given the negative externalities of the power generation used to power it.

sure, bitcoin is stupid, let's not do that. on the list of common sense things we should do to combat climate change, energy used for AI is like #100, especially considering the big names are trying to use nuclear ASAP to power it in a clean way

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

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

do you want a causal weather model or one that can predict the weather well?

The current crop of AI weather models captures a surprisingly robust array of "core dynamics". E.g., recent work by Hakim and Masanam [1] reproduce classic dynamical core test cases on AI weather models and show that in many cases they robustly capture the expected dynamical responses to these highly idealized setups - setups far outside the bounds of what the models are trained on. What this means is that the causal…

thanks for providing evidence that these two things don't need to contradict.

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

#214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a joke about how silly valley based companies will claim the moon and back and then design a car that doesn’t know dumping snow in the boot is bad.

The work was done by DeepMind, which is in the UK. Weather in the UK is quite variable and difficult to predict (which is why the English are always talking about it).

English weather depends on wind direction:

  south-west: mild, wet
  north-west: cool, wet
  north-east: cold, dry
  south-east: hot, dry
If you also use a simple barometer, to get pressure level (say, 4 bands) and pressure change direction (rising/falling), you can be 95% accurate.

Final finesse:

  Red sky at night shepherd's delight
  Red sky in the morning shepherd's warning

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

#215
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The peace prize isn’t awarded by the Nobel committee either.

How so? The Nobel committee picks candidates for all the prizes, and the final decisions are split up over four different institutions. The only argument I could see along these lines would be favoring the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in particular, but that would mean that chemistry, physics, and economics count but medicine doesn't count. And that's just confusing.

Ah, it is the one in economy that is not actually an official Nobel prize, but a prize in his memory or something like that.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Memorial_Prize_in_Econ...

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

#216
post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How so? The Nobel committee picks candidates for all the prizes, and the final decisions are split up over four different institutions. The only argument I could see along these lines would be favoring the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in particular, but that would mean that chemistry, physics, and economics count but medicine doesn't count. And that's just confusing.

Ah, it is the one in economy that is not actually an official Nobel prize, but a prize in his memory or something like that. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Memorial_Prize_in_Econ...

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