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GraphCast: AI model for weather forecasting

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Re: GraphCast: AI model for weather forecasting

#241

Post by tokai »

Anon84 wrote: post #238
tokai wrote: post #219

Just like their flu modelling outperformed conventional models right?

Humm... are you referring to Google Flu? [1] That was a very different beast. It relied on using Google searches to infer the prevalence of various Influenza Like Illnesses in real time, while the CDC reports data with a 2-week lag. Notably, some of the queries they found to be correlated were... strange... like NBA results. Not unsurprisingly (in hindsight, at least) [2], this eventually broke down when epidemics an…

Yeah I know its way different methods. Sorry for being disingenuous. The point of my snarking was that google made a lot of noise about Google Flu but then quietly got rid of it when it didn't work. To me Googles research has a tendency to be more about headlines than actually solving problems.

Re: GraphCast: AI model for weather forecasting

#242

Post by hackernewds »

tchvil wrote: post #235

windguru which is in part or fully based on crowd-sourced weather stations is already surprisingly accurate few days in advance, in many regions I tried. For a few hours forecast nothing beats the rain radar. I wonder if they have already or will put some AI in their models.

anecdata does not equal data?

Re: GraphCast: AI model for weather forecasting

#244

Post by Lacerda69 »

hackernewds wrote: post #243
tony_cannistra wrote: post #214

Similar methodologies are being applied to climate modeling, too. The Allen Institute has worked on it for a while, and has hired quite a few PhDs ( https://allenai.org/climate-modeling ).

why is hiring phds a measure?

if you don't hire phds you're not serious about it

Re: GraphCast: AI model for weather forecasting

#246

Post by famouswaffles »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #210
ArnoVW wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s difficult to retain top talent if you do not allow them to publish.

How does Apple do it, if anyone knows? Apple is so loathe to keep their potential product plans hidden that AAPL employees aren’t even allowed to have GitHub accounts without mgr approval… but they have to be employing serious researchers, but they’ll never get to publish on volition.

Apple does publish some stuff. But anyway it's a balance between publishing and shipping products. The researcher wants to get some credit for his/her work. If you ship a lot of products he can put his/her name on then publishing research isn't quite as important and vice versa.

Re: GraphCast: AI model for weather forecasting

#248

Post by alberth »

Is this really an "AI" story?

Aren't existing weather forecasting models, already a form of "AI"?

I'm no AI/ML expert, but isn't the real story here is that a new model (like GPT-4.0) is better than the previous/existing model (GPT-3.5).

It's just grabs way more attention calling the new model "AI" (vs not referring to the old as such).

Re: GraphCast: AI model for weather forecasting

#249

Post by uoaei »

giovannibonetti wrote: post #211
isaacfrond wrote: post #191

I find this quite surprising actually. You'd think predicting the weather is mostly a matter of fast computation. The physical rules are well understood, so to get a better estimate use a finer mesh in your finite element computation and use a smaller time scale in estimating your differential equations. Neural networks are notoriously bad at exact approximation. I mean you can never beat a calculator when the issue…

AI/ML's bitter lesson [1] applies again. In this case, the AI model may have learned a more practical model than the one human researchers painstakingly came up with by applying piles and piles of physics research. [1] http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html

Hardly. They trained on the output of numerical simulations, so it's basically a method for summarizing approximate dynamics of numerical simulations themselves.

Re: GraphCast: AI model for weather forecasting

#250

Post by patall »

hackitup7 wrote: post #245

I've been really impressed at how much better weather forecasting has become already. I remember weather forecasts feeling like a total crapshoot as recently as 15 years ago or so.

Isn't that highly subjective to where you live? Because I moved to Scandinavia and the forecast here is so incredibly bad, compared to central europe.
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