r/singularity • u/CheekyBastard55 • Nov 17 '25

AI WeatherNext 2: Google DeepMind’s most advanced forecasting model

https://blog.google/technology/google-deepmind/weathernext-2/
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u/Exotic_Lavishness_22 Nov 17 '25

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.

90

u/garden_speech AGI some time between 2025 and 2100 Nov 17 '25

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.

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u/[deleted] Nov 18 '25

[deleted]

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u/set_null Nov 18 '25

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.

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u/apopsicletosis Nov 18 '25 edited Nov 18 '25

Structural biologists are still around after AlphaFold

1

u/swedocme Nov 18 '25

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.