Loading video...

Video Failed to Load

Go Home

GenCast is a diffusion model, similar to the machine learning models which also power generative AI. 🎨 We trained it on 40 years of historical data from ECMWF, which included variables such as temperature, wind speed, and pressure at various altitudes - enabling it to learn global weather patterns.

26,360 views • 1 year ago •via X (Twitter)

8 Comments

Google DeepMind's profile picture
Google DeepMind1 year ago

Today in @Nature, we’re presenting GenCast: our new AI weather model which gives us the probabilities of different weather conditions up to 15 days ahead with state-of-the-art accuracy. ☁️⚡ Here’s how the technology works. 🧵

Google DeepMind's profile picture
Google DeepMind1 year ago

Weather affects almost everything - from our daily lives 🏠 to agriculture 🚜 to producing renewable energy 🔋 and more. Forecasting traditionally uses physics based models which can take hours on a huge supercomputer. We want to do it in minutes - and better.

Google DeepMind's profile picture
Google DeepMind1 year ago

Our previous AI model was able to provide a single, best estimate of future weather. But this can't be predicted exactly. So GenCast takes a probabilistic approach to forecasting. It makes 50 or more predictions of how the weather may change, showing us how likely different scenarios are.

Google DeepMind's profile picture
Google DeepMind1 year ago

GenCast is able to generate a single 15-day scenario in 8 minutes on a single TPU chip. When predicting extreme heat 🌡️, cold 🧊, and high wind speeds 💨, it consistently outperformed the current best operational forecast known as ENS.

Google DeepMind's profile picture
Google DeepMind1 year ago

It can also deliver superior predictions of the tracks of tropical cyclones, up to 5 days in advance. GenCast’s capabilities could not only help officials better prepare for disasters but also in other aspects of society, such as renewable energy planning. 🔋

Google DeepMind's profile picture
Google DeepMind1 year ago

AI in weather forecasting will help benefit billions of people in their everyday lives. To help enable further research and accelerate advances, we’re releasing the GenCast model code to the wider community. We’ll soon be releasing real-time and historical forecasts. Find out more. ↓

Roozbeh's profile picture
Roozbeh1 year ago

@ECMWF Any link you can share that compares its ensemble accuracy vs. physics based/traditional models?

Isabel Perez's profile picture
Isabel Perez1 year ago

@ECMWF How about running simulations for unknown scenarios? With global warming the predictability needs to be better than the 40 years of past data. I would love to know more about this! :)

Related Videos

New PNAS paper. Historical GDP per capita data is scarce, but data on the places of birth, death, and occupations of famous individuals is abundant. In this paper we estimate the historical GDP per capita of hundreds of regions in Europe and North America using a machine learning model that leveraged data on about 500k famous biographies. Our estimates more-or-less quadruple the availability of historical GDP per capita estimates for the last 700 years. So why use biographies to augment historical GDP per capita data? Biographical data contains information about people who might have contributed directly to economic growth, like James Watt, or that were attracted to wealthy places looking for patrons, like Michelangelo. So we--mainly Philipp (Philipp Koch)--used this data to construct hundreds of features describing each European region. Then, we trained a machine learning model to find the features that explained most of the variance in a cross-validation test, where we split regions multiple times into a training set and a test set. On average, the model explained about 90% of the variance in GDP per capita of the regions it had not seen during training. But we wanted to go further, and Philipp really went to town by looking at different ways to validate our estimates. We found our estimates correlate positively with historical measures of wellbeing, church building activity, urbanization, and body height. We also used these measures to reproduce the basic Atlantic trade result of Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robison and to explore the economic consequences of the famous Lisbon earthquake of 1755. But what I personally loved most about this project, other than working with Philipp Koch and V, is that it shows that we can use machine learning methods not only to explore the future, but the past. There is a bright and growing future in the use of machine learning for economic history. Hope you enjoy the paper and the data. You can find links to the paper and a data exploration tool in the first comment.

César A. Hidalgo

54,332 views • 1 year ago