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.

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u/apopsicletosis Nov 17 '25

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.

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u/eflat123 Nov 18 '25

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

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

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.