A good AI story from Google DeepMind

 

GraphCast's forecast for New Zealand Sun 19 Nov

In recent months, we've become used to news stories declaring AI poses humanity an existential threat, that a superintelligence "whose values do not align with ours" may exterminate us all. So, it's nice to see a good AI news story. Yesterday, a team at Google's Deepmind published a paper in Science, Learning skilful medium-range global weather forecasting. They have trained a deep learning model on publically available global historical weather data. They show that their model makes better weather predictions "much faster than the industry gold-standard weather simulation system – the High-Resolution Forecast (HRES), produced by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF)".

Moreover, their system, GraphCast, is fast. They say, "While GraphCast's training was computationally intensive, the resulting forecasting model is highly efficient. Making 10-day forecasts with GraphCast takes less than a minute on a single Google TPU v4 machine. For comparison, a 10-day forecast using a conventional approach, such as HRES, can take hours of computation in a supercomputer with hundreds of machines."

In January, Auckland, New Zealand's largest city, received a year's worth of unforecasted rain in a single afternoon, causing widespread flooding. Cars floated down streets, road were washed away, houses slipped down hillsides, and people died. Better weather forecasting can help prevent this. You can try out GraphCast's 10-day forecast here. I'm going to Waiheke Island on Sunday. It looks like the weather will be Okay.