alt Hacker NewsI am dearly hoping that they are using the current "AI" craze to talk up the machine learning methods they have presumably been using for a decade at this point, and not that they have actually integrated an LLM into a weather model.
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It’s not an LLM, but it is genAI. It’s based on the same idea of predict-the-next-thing, but instead of predicting words it predicts the next state of the atmosphere from the current state.
The GraphCast paper says "GraphCast is implemented using GNNs" without explaining that the acronym stands for Graph Neural Networks. It contrasts GNNs to the " convolutional neural network (CNN)" and "graph attention network." (GAN?) It doesn't really explain the difference between GAN and a GNN. I think LLMs are GANs. So no, it's not an LLM in a weather model, but it's very similar to an LLM in terms of how it is trained.
You're absolutely right! That was a category 5. Thanks for pointing that out.
Hopefully they weren’t all forced out this year. The NOAA had massive cuts.
Same. I hope this was written by hardened greybeards who have dedicated their lives to weather prediction and atmospheric modeling, and have "weathered" a few funding cycles.
Graphcast (the model this is based on) has been validated in weather models for a while[1]. It uses transformers, much like LLMs. Transformers are really impressive at modeling a variety of things and have become very common throughout a lot of ML models, there's no reason to besmirch these methods as "integrating an LLM into a weather model"
[1] https://github.com/google-deepmind/graphcast