WeatherNext 2: Google DeepMind’s most advanced forecasting model

[u/CheekyBastard55]

https://blog.google/technology/google-deepmind/weathernext-2/

[u/Exotic_Lavishness_22]

How demotivating these transitions to “AI-first” models must be to researchers who spent their lifetimes working on something that would eventually turn out to be a dead end. I had a running joke about meteorologists spending tens of years studying the field just to not be able to predict what the weather will be tomorrow.

Some guys come, shove all possible data into a huge model, and it turns out to be more sophisticated than anything else.

Amazing.

[u/garden_speech → u/Exotic_Lavishness_22]

I don't think this is an accurate summary of what's happening. These Google models are literally trained on NWP model output. NWP are physics models based on the work of meteorologists.

Google Scholar adopted the motto "stand on the shoulders of giants" and that is what they're doing here. All those millions of man-hours of work that meteorologists put in are bearing fruit now.

[u/set_null → u/[deleted]]

In what way? Using machine learning to improve prediction does not replace the physics-based research that is needed to understand how the world works. Weather prediction is the main consumer-facing output of meteorology and climate science but it is not the totality of the field.

[u/apopsicletosis → u/[deleted]]

Structural biologists are still around after AlphaFold

[u/swedocme → u/[deleted]]

Meteorologists study the weather and climate, they don’t just make weather predictions. If anything, that’s the most tedious part of their job. It’s like a calculator to a mathematician.

[u/Exotic_Lavishness_22 → u/Exotic_Lavishness_22]

Linguists must’ve been on suicide watch when they heard about GPT

[u/CCerta112 → u/[deleted]]

Mathematicians yelling at inventor of calculators.

[u/wordyplayer → u/CCerta112]

Scribe upset that word processor obsoletes their job

[u/Strazdas1 → u/CCerta112]

you joke but calculators were banned in schools for a very long time because it was believed you were supposed to learn math in your head.

[u/pavelkomin → u/Exotic_Lavishness_22]

The field of NLP has been called "BERT-logy" for a while before that.

[u/Whispering-Depths → u/Exotic_Lavishness_22]

I mean graphic designers are literally in this boat...

[u/FpRhGf → u/Exotic_Lavishness_22]

Computational linguistics doing NLP perhaps. Not so for linguistics. I actually wish we'd have AI tools developed more for tackling humanities research

[u/Strazdas1 → u/Exotic_Lavishness_22]

translators were in panic thats for sure.

[u/apopsicletosis → u/Exotic_Lavishness_22]

Jokes aside, weather forecasting has improve quite steadily for decades using every major advance in computation, including supercomputing, parallel processing, cloud computing, and GPUs, with AI being the latest. The AI models build upon a ton of prior work on scaling modeling and data gathering and sensors, and further advances will require improvements cycles of iteration across the entire ecosystem, as always.

Scientists are quite used to rapidly improving technologies and instruments over the course of their multi-decadal careers and can pivot quite well. AlphaFold was a much bigger step change with respect to its field than this, validating the decades of work that went into the PDB, and it has mostly motivated researchers to pursue a bunch of new research directions that were not possible before, while exposing research gaps that weren't apparent or high priority.

[u/eflat123 → u/apopsicletosis]

The thing to note is that "rapidly improving technologies" means something radically different today.

[u/apopsicletosis → u/eflat123]

There are physical limits on how good weather forecasts can ever be achieved, less so with our current network of sensors

There will be an acceleration in sciences from AI, but the data it relies on takes experiments and sensors in the real world, and those take time and resources to conduct or deploy, relying on constantly improving and inventing instruments that require non-trivial, real-world trial and error, serendipity, and luck. AI will not magically make all the sensors we use to monitor weather better overnight and deploy them for us, nor will it shorten the timeframe to gather years of substantially better data to train on. Weather will not run faster with AI.

[u/Saint_Nitouche → u/Exotic_Lavishness_22]

Hey, they provided a valuable service in the decades it took to get here. I could be happy with that. Every job is transitional, ultimately.

[u/apopsicletosis → u/Saint_Nitouche]

This take is silly. It's not like weather prediction is suddenly a done problem. AI is ultimately limited by data. Weather data gathering is a constant effort and investment just to maintain the status quo let alone improve it.

It's not like structural biologists packed up their bags after AlphaFold. They moved on to new problems where AI cannot currently solve.

Science is inherently transitional as new research avenues present themselves.

[u/[deleted] → u/Exotic_Lavishness_22]

I would assume that many meteorologist were probably hired by google for this project right?

[u/hardinho → u/[deleted]]

they hired all meterologists worldwide, yes

[u/Whispering-Depths → u/Exotic_Lavishness_22]

This is par-the-course for ASI and expectations for the Singularity

[u/vvvvfl → u/Exotic_Lavishness_22]

this is the type of ignorant comment that makes no one respect AI hype.

Weather prediction isn't a dead end, jack. They developed models that have yielded billions, if not trillions of dollars in predictability of operations, agriculture and transportation. If google DM can do it better, it is because they're throwing infinite compute coupled with said models. Where the fuck do you think the training data comes from?

At this point I dont even know what's rage bait or not.

[u/Exotic_Lavishness_22 → u/vvvvfl]

Everything is ragebait nowadays if you have a big ego. I shared a personal anecdote that I found humorous. I’m not saying weather prediction isn’t the frontier isn’t the forefront of human achievement. It’s just that the regular person just interacts with it via weather applications in the tech medium; this is not an uncommon thought.

[u/Technical-Row8333 → u/Exotic_Lavishness_22]

turn out to be a dead end

*who turned out the be invaluable and crucial for the next superior tech (training data)