Google’s weather-forecast AI did “breathtakingly” well at predicting this year’s hurricane season, a development that could help officials better prepare for incoming storms.
Google’s DeepMind was the best-performing among 11 models; The US National Weather Service’s supercomputer-powered model did worst. Google’s version outperformed even the official expert forecast using an aggregation of several forecasts. The results are “gobsmacking,” a science writer said in Ars Technica; Google’s model can run on a single computer and provide a forecast in minutes, while traditional models need supercomputers with tens of thousands of processors, and take hours. What’s more, the AI models can learn from mistakes, meaning they are likely to continue improving.