r/singularity • u/141_1337 ▪️e/acc | AGI: ~2030 | ASI: ~2040 | FALSGC: ~2050 | :illuminati: • 1d ago
The Singularity is Near Google DeepMind’s AI weather model picked up Hurricane Isaias 11 days before landfall, pinned where it would hit 4 days out and nailed its peak strength 3 days out—potentially giving communities days more time to evacuate and prepare
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u/141_1337 ▪️e/acc | AGI: ~2030 | ASI: ~2040 | FALSGC: ~2050 | :illuminati: 1d ago
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u/141_1337 ▪️e/acc | AGI: ~2030 | ASI: ~2040 | FALSGC: ~2050 | :illuminati: 1d ago
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u/Juicemoose222 1d ago
Nope, ai is useless, its glorified autofill and will nevwr be used for anything actually useful /s
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u/141_1337 ▪️e/acc | AGI: ~2030 | ASI: ~2040 | FALSGC: ~2050 | :illuminati: 1d ago
[Insert obligatory AI is an stochastic parrot comment]
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u/cactusgenie 1d ago
It's just a next word predictor /s
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u/BoldTaters 23h ago
Does anyone know if this was an llm powered prediction or if this was done by specially trained neural network?
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u/Nojopar 15h ago
Funny enough, that's basically all it did in this case, but of course not with the next 'word'. It used historical data and ran the numbers making a probability prediction of the next step in the hurricane. This is the exact sort of scenario that neural networks are built to do. It's pretty amazing! The real question is if it's any good with atypical weather patterns, which are becoming more the norm with climate change. Then we don't have historical precedence to rely upon.
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u/djamp42 19h ago
Anytime someone says this and then I see what LLMs can do.. I come to the conclusion that I myself am glorified autofill.. lol
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u/JKastnerPhoto 18h ago
When you use it to make silly flyers for your business, yes it's awful. But in helping process massive amounts of data, it's pretty cool. I've been using it in family tree research. Its ability to read church records scribbled in Latin changed everything. I would look at its findings and my jaw would drop. Then it just helps keep track of who's who in a colonial database of hundreds of people with the same last name. Yes it's made errors so it's not a blind trust, but wow it has it down.
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u/AcidicAzide 23h ago
Well, I'm not saying the people you are mocking are right, but in my experience, they are specifically refering to LLMs. This was not done by an LLM.
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u/genshiryoku AI specialist 22h ago
No those people mock generative movels. This is still a generative model, just not an LLM, but still transformer and attention mechanic based.
Of course those people don't know the difference but I think this type of model does fall within their usual "generative AI is bad" spiel. But from personal experience the moment it actually does something good it's just waved away as "yes but that is different" as their ideas aren't really concrete or objective.
It's best to just ignore them altogether./
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u/AcidicAzide 20h ago edited 20h ago
In all honesty, I have never seen anyone hating all generative models. I have never seen people hate on AlphaFold, or models generating drug candidates, or models recognizing tumors. In fact a common saying with "AI haters" is "I want AI to cure cancer, not create cat videos". I have only ever seen hate on models generating pictures, videos, music and text.
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u/Mrp1Plays 20h ago
Then you haven't seen enough
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u/AcidicAzide 18h ago
Okay, then show me some examples :)
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u/kaityl3 ASI▪️2024-2027 18h ago
Just go to the AI wars or anti ai subreddits...
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u/AcidicAzide 17h ago
Sorry, all I'm seeing there is hate on LLMs, image/video/music generation. Could you give me a link to a post where people hate on AlphaFold, this meteorology model or any other use of AI models in science?
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u/kaityl3 ASI▪️2024-2027 16h ago
What they're saying is about hate towards "all genAI". Obviously most of the people making the claims about it aren't going to be calling out AlphaFold by name because they don't know about it. Also it's more often in the comments than in posts/submissions.
But like, I'm not your servant lol, I pointed you in the right direction where you'll find some. However, I'm not about to go personally take time out of my day to peruse the subs to get links for you
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u/AcidicAzide 11h ago
Okay, then I will just conclude you are making things up. Not a single piece of concrete evidence. Have a nice day.
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u/Mrp1Plays 17h ago
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u/AcidicAzide 17h ago
I apologize, I'm not trying to be dense (maybe I just AM). I looked through about a hundred best rated posts in this month and I could not find any hate on the use of AI in science that I have mentioned in my previous comment. Could you point me to a specific post where people hate on them?
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u/space_monster 12h ago
"I only hate gen AI" is a really common thing to see. It's how anti-AI people rebrand their position to allow support for medical AI etc.
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u/hardinho 22h ago
Some of the comments in this thread just shows what kind of folk joined here lol
Do they really think the weather model is a distilled Gemini or something? The guy who told you to stfu is one of them
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u/space_monster 11h ago
It's also disingenuous though to pretend LLMs and things like medical AI aren't cross-pollinating. Gen AI is hugely important in medical research. This weather model is gen AI. when people complain about LLMs they're really just complaining about an application of gen AI, not the technology itself.
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11h ago
[deleted]
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u/space_monster 11h ago
Yes it is
https://developers.google.com/weathernext/guides/models
"Architecture: Functional Generative Network (FGN) mesh transformer"
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u/Smile_Clown 13h ago
Let's stop doing this. It doesn't make them stupid and it doesn't make you a genius. This kind of comment is useless and takes way from whatever the post is and is just self grandizing.
There is no need to bring up a boogeyman in every reddit post.
I also want to point out that statistically, YOU are someone another person is referencing. None of us al always right, have the right knowledge or opinion or experience.
Those who post these things do not contribute to anything and are arguably worse than someone making the claim you are inserting toward them. Not only is it empty but you group everything/everyone together without nuance so it makes you seem petty AND ignorant.
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u/CrispityCraspits 16h ago
I don't agree with this take. But the way people mindlessly upvote slogans like this without processing that this wasn't even a LLM, or having the foggiest idea whether this did any better than normal forecasting, much less that it is consistently better than normal forecasting, is not great either.
AI isn't a stochastic parrot but neither should you be joining a cargo cult that worships the AI and praises any claim that it is good at something.
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u/OldStray79 23h ago
Meteorologists did not ask for this.. /s
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u/141_1337 ▪️e/acc | AGI: ~2030 | ASI: ~2040 | FALSGC: ~2050 | :illuminati: 23h ago
Meteorology is about human intuition over the weather, can't have an AI doing the predictions, it wouldn't let Meteorologist self actualize themselves you know?
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u/Orgasm_Faker 23h ago
But does it actually help meteorologists with the understanding of meteorology? Does it help developing new meteorological techniques?
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u/space_monster 11h ago
Well I mean yeah, sure, because you can ask an AI why this modelling method yields better results. But you probably won't like the response, which will be along the lines of "gen AI is required for this type of modelling". It's not like humans can replicate the process, it's just a case of analysing huge data sets and identifying patterns.
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u/FaceDeer 22h ago
In another thread I was assured on no uncertain terms that unless the AI can explain exactly how it came up with this prediction then it is valueless.
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u/Charming_Cucumber_15 19h ago
It's better to let people die than to save them through something that can't be fully explained by humans!
We didn't even ask if meteorologists asked Google to predict the weather first??
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u/pmjm 17h ago
One correct prediction doesn't mean it's going to be consistent. And unless it can explain, we can't validate it. For matters of life-and-death like hurricanes, validation is important, precisely because of human behavior. False alarms will lead to complacency, which will lead to deaths.
Maybe this will change once it has a proven track record, but it's not unreasonable to ask for an explanation at this phase.
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u/JuicySpaceFox 21h ago
I mean kinda. It be very good to know how it came to the conclusion so we can check it ourselfs and be able to do it too later. And just like in normal science youd should peer review but if the AI doesnt give how it cane to the conclusion u cant. So basicly no way to check if its right ahead of time.
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u/KoogZzZzZ 19h ago
bold of us to assume we will be able to check everything AI will bring, for the bad or for the good it will be beyond our comprehension most of the times from now on
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u/JuicySpaceFox 19h ago
Bold of you assume people wont. We should and if people had enough time they would. AI is not magic it also has to abide by the same rules for stuff we do. Its just that it can do it faster and keep track easier.
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u/space_monster 11h ago
Humans can't do what weatherlab does. That's the whole point. It's not like some secret modelling technique that humans missed, it's about crunching vast datasets and looking for patterns.
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u/Nojopar 15h ago
This is the exact sort of situation that neural networks are built to do - take historical data and make incredibly detailed probability models incredibly fast. As a tool, it's fantastic!
But building knowledge of how hurricanes operate, nothing of note there. Different purposes and outcomes is all.
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u/CrispityCraspits 16h ago
The AI makes a future prediction about a hurricane. It would indicate that we should evacuate a portion of the coast at huge cost. But, if the hurricane does hit there, it will have a even greater cost and risk to life.
Conventional forecasts don't agree. And human forecasters don't know what the prediction is based on or how the AI arrived at it.
And your take would be: evacuate the area? Because it got one prediction right one time?
The level of lazy stupid snark about the math thing is off the charts in this sub.
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u/Justgetmeabeer 17h ago
Ask these same people how something like a car or a computer works and I'm sure they would sputter out "well, someone knows how it works"
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u/mvandemar 23h ago edited 9h ago
Giving them days more to evacuate? Sure, but they won't.
Source: I live in Florida.
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u/space_monster 11h ago
You can literally just go to their website to track hurricanes yourself. You don't have to wait for someone to give you a courtesy call
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u/mvandemar 10h ago
I have absolutely no idea what your comment has to do with what I said. Like none.
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u/space_monster 10h ago
Ok I misinterpreted - I thought you were complaining about not getting warnings rather than pointing out that people won't actually heed warnings
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u/zeb_linux 21h ago
To be scientifically significant, you would have to: 1. compare its prediction with other methods ("crushed" compared to?...) 2. that it can do this reliably several times, aka what is the success rate over several occurrences.
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u/ihadagoodone 18h ago
the lack of comparison is telling. It seems to me that the predictions aren't much better than what NOAA would have done 10 years ago, probably because it was just using NOAA's methodology to begin with.
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u/space_monster 11h ago
https://www.articsledge.com/post/ai-weather-forecasting
"AI weather models like GraphCast (Google DeepMind), Pangu-Weather (Huawei), and AIFS (ECMWF) now match or beat traditional physics-based models on most standard forecast metrics."
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u/space_monster 11h ago
Why TF would you assume this hasn't happened? A simple google search would have made that obvious.
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u/zeb_linux 11h ago
Because instead of a Google search I prefer to rely on peer reviewed science publications.
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u/space_monster 11h ago
Did you know that google search is a handy way to find peer reviewed science publications?
You're welcome
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u/zeb_linux 44m ago
I think you are missing the point. The problem is not how to find them. The problem is that much if the AI results we saw in many fields (maths, biology, etc) have not been properly vetted by rigourous, repeated, cross checks and reproduction that are the foundation of scientific publishing process. The staggering amount of money invested in this technology in such a short timing is unprecedented and may lead to distorsion, due to a "too big to fail" status. Not saying it has not its use, but the claim that AI is able to solve every task and what not is completely irrational.
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u/space_monster 15m ago
I'm not missing any points. this is not some fun side project by DeepMind, this is a mission-critical meteorological forecasting platform that's being tested into the ground, because lives depend on it. it's benchmarked against other AI systems and traditional forecasting models using NASA data, NOAA data, 3rd-party storm archives etc. etc. - plus it's open-source weights so it's open for inspection by anyone.
and this isn't a case of just using AI to try and solve everything, AI is perfectly suited to large-scale modelling with huge datasets. weather forecasting is a blatantly obvious application for it.
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u/VariationsOfCalculus 22h ago
Not very useful statement if we don't know what the legacy approach was capable of, if it could do it in 10 days rather than 11, then this is nice but not shocking.
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u/hungy-popinpobopian 21h ago
Not to mention it's a sample size of 1. Who knows how many hurricanes it got wrong.
Having said that I have heard that Google's AI weather is particularly well suited to cyclones/hurricanes and it is been considered for implementation alongside traditional forecasting by major weather agencies (source: I work for a weather agency and they have mentioned looking to use google Deepmind AI for this use case)
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u/championchilli 22h ago
Yeah and imagine if we gave a fraction of the funding Google deepmind has to meteorological services.
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u/space_monster 11h ago
We do know how AI weather models compare against physics models, it's been extensively studied for years.
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u/dmcnaughton1 20h ago
It looks like it's a model built on NVIDIA's FCN3 model, which has a pretty solid track record for medium term forecasts. It's exciting seeing stuff like this come out, where we can get more than just a couple days of track and intensity forecasts before the error bars get too wide to be useful. Hoping we get more and more specialized models for weather events and can improve alert times, as well as providing better rain models for farms.
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u/Nojopar 15h ago
Yeah, the real hold up here isn't the calculations - it's the data time slices and spatial accuracy. Those are getting better every year, but that's always going to be the constraining limit. Well that and climate change is throwing off old models all the time, which this model, like most models, assumes is accurate for its predictions.
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u/dmcnaughton1 14h ago
I would caution against assuming that climate change isn't accounted for in this model. It very well could be adjusting for those changes, especially given that the climate change effects themselves are included in the current data input. We know for example that the hotter the air, the more capacity for moisture it has, and that affects both precipitation and humidity forecasts.
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u/Nojopar 14h ago
I don't imagine it adequately accounts for climate change because nobody really knows the effects of climate change more broadly. We know some of the effects - hotter air, for instance - but we don't know all the interactive effects. Hotter air does wonky things to wind shear, for instance, which prohibits hurricane formation. That's one of dozens if not hundreds of things that climate change makes wonky. The only thing we know for certain with climate change is that the past is a weaker predictor than it once was. I don't doubt the models are taking climate change into account but it can only do as well as we know, and there's soooo much we just don't know.
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u/space_monster 11h ago
It looks like it's a model built on NVIDIA's FCN3 model
No it isn't, they're different models from different labs with different architectures.
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u/5551212555 14h ago
Pretty impressive. I'm running Weather Next on my information API for agents. It beats the weather forecasts every time (because climate change has screwed up traditional models).
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u/soushibo 8h ago
It's not a meteorologist, it just predicts next most probable position of the hurricane...
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u/p0rty-Boi 5h ago
I wonder how many predictions it made in total for that same storm/area/time frame. If it’s a oneshot that’s very impressive. If it’s one of several thousand possible scenarios it predicted, not so much.
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u/_KryptonytE_ 1d ago
If this is true, I'd let them pass on all of the other fucked up things they're currently doing. I'll forgive them for not releasing intelligence as actual usable models as long as somebody at Deepmind is applying the tech themselves to save a single life, human or otherwise.
Cheers!!! 🥂
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u/mvandemar 23h ago
It's true, not sure why you'd doubt it.
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u/_KryptonytE_ 23h ago
Maybe because we've caught them lying through their teeth about anything as long as the lies help them influence PR and their stock prices. The burden of truth is on them and doubt is just a consequence of their own actions.
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u/CapitalWarm 21h ago
It seems that Google is going for narrow AI and is possibly waiting in the wings for the catastrophes of AGI to happen.
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u/Ok_Zookeepergame8714 1d ago
https://deepmind.google.com/science/weatherlab
It's here BTW. I'm verifying how it's faring against European ICON, and it's worse...😔 But, apparently, it's good for hurricanes.