谷歌推出人工智能體可顯著做好15 日天氣預報 (1/2)

Recently The New York Times reported the following:

Google Introduces A.I. Agent That Aces 15-Day Weather Forecasts (1/2)

GenCast, from the company’s DeepMind division, outperformed the world’s best predictions of deadly storms as well as everyday weather.

By William J. Broad

Dec. 4, 2024

In the 1960s, weather scientists found that the chaotic nature of Earth’s atmosphere would put a limit on how far into the future their forecasts might peer. Two weeks seemed to be the limit. Still, by the early 2000s, the great difficulty of the undertaking kept reliable forecasts restricted to about a week.

Now, a new artificial intelligence tool from DeepMind, a Google company in London that develops A.I. applications, has smashed through the old barriers and achieved what its makers call unmatched skill and speed in devising 15-day weather forecasts. They report in the journal Nature on Wednesday that their new model can, among other things, outperform the world’s best forecasts meant to track deadly storms and save lives.

“It’s a big deal,” said Kerry Emanuel, a professor emeritus of atmospheric science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was not involved in the DeepMind research. “It’s an important step forward.”

In 2019, Dr. Emanuel and six other experts, writing in the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, argued that advancing the development of reliable forecasts to a length of 15 days from 10 days would have “enormous socioeconomic benefits” by helping the public avoid the worst effects of extreme weather.

Ilan Price, the new paper’s lead author and a senior research scientist at DeepMind, described the new A.I. agent, which the team calls GenCast, as much faster than traditional methods. “And it’s more accurate,” he added.

He and his colleagues found that GenCast ran circles around DeepMind’s previous A.I. weather program, which debuted in late 2023 with reliable 10-day forecasts. Rémi Lam, the lead scientist on that project and one of a dozen co-authors on the new paper, described the company’s weather team as having made surprisingly fast progress.

“I’m a little bit reluctant to say it, but it’s like we’ve made decades worth of improvements in one year,” he said in an interview. “We’re seeing really, really rapid progress.”

The world leader in atmospheric prediction is the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. Comparative tests regularly show that its projections exceed all others in accuracy.

DeepMind tested its new A.I. program against the center’s Ensemble Prediction System — a service that 35 nations rely on to produce their own weather forecasts. The team compared how the 15-day forecasts of both systems performed in predicting a designated set of 1,320 global wind speeds, temperatures and other atmospheric features.

The Nature report said the new agent outdid the center’s forecasts 97.2 percent of time. The A.I. achievement, the authors wrote, “helps open the next chapter in operational weather forecasting.”

Matthew Chantry, an A.I. specialist at the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, said his agency was already adopting some of its features.

“That’s how highly we think of it,” he said. Machine learning in general, Dr. Chantry added, was accelerating human bids to outmaneuver some of nature’s deadliest threats.

DeepMind’s weather advance comes two months after other A.I. researchers in the company shared the Nobel Prize for chemistry. The scientific news forms a bright counterpoint to public fears of A.I. stealing jobs and driving humans to the edge of obsolescence.

The natural chaos in Earth’s atmosphere means that all weather forecasts, including the two-week variety, grow less reliable as they peer further into the future. Even so, AccuWeather offers 90-day forecasts. And the Old Farmer’s Almanac says it can gaze ahead 60 days.

DeepMind backs its 15-day declaration with pages of evidence laid out in one of the world’s leading science journals, Nature. So too, Google posted an online blog that details the A.I. advance.

The new GenCast agent takes a radically different approach from mainstream forecasting, which uses room-size supercomputers that turn millions of global observations and calculations into predictions. Instead, the DeepMind agent runs on smaller machines and studies the atmospheric patterns of the past to learn the subtle dynamics that result in the planet’s weather.

The DeepMind team trained GenCast on a massive archive of weather data curated by the European center. The training period went from 1979 to 2018, or 40 years. The team then tested how well the agent could predict 2019’s weather.

Such training empowers all types of generative A.I. — the kind that’s creative. Mimicking how humans learn, it spots patterns in mountains of data and then makes new, original material that has similar characteristics.

(to be continued)

Translation

谷歌推出人工智能體可顯著做好15 日天氣預報 (1/2)

該公司 DeepMind 部門的 GenCast 的表現優於世界上對致命風暴和日常天氣的最佳預測。

2024 年 12 月 4 日

在1960 年代，氣象科學家發現，地球大氣層的混亂性質限制了他們對未來的預測。兩週似乎是極限了。儘管如此，到了 2000 年代初，這項工作的巨大困難, 令可得到可靠的預測僅限於一周左右。

現在，一家位於倫敦的Google的發展應用程式公司DeepMind的一種新式人工智能工具已經衝破了這舊的障礙，並在設計 15 天天氣預報方面, 實現了其製造商所説的無與倫比技能和速度。他們週三在《自然》雜誌上報道說，他們的新模型, 包括可以超越世界上其他最佳預測, 用以追踪致命風暴和拯救生命。

麻省理工學院大氣科學名譽教授Kerry Emanuel說:「這是一件大事」，他沒有參與 DeepMind 研究。 “這是向前邁出的重要一步。”

2019 年，Emanuel博士和其他六位專家在《大氣科學雜誌》上撰文指出，將可靠預報的時間從 10 天推長到 15 天，會有「巨大的社會經濟效益」。可以幫助公眾避免極端天氣的最嚴重影響。

這新論文的主要作者、DeepMind 的高級研究科學家 Ilan Price 描述了這新的人工智能。團隊將這新人工智能體稱為 GenCast, 稱它比傳統方法快得多。 他補充道:“而且它更準確”。

他和他的同事發現 GenCast 比之前的DeepMind人工智能更好、更快。該天氣計劃，於 2023 年底首次推出，提供可靠的 10 天預報。該計劃的首席科學家、新論文的十幾位合著者之一Rémi Lam表示，該公司的氣象團隊取得了令人驚訝的快速進展。

他在接受採訪時說:「我有點不願意這麼說，但這就像我們在一年內取得了幾十年的進步」。 “我們看到了非常非常快的進展。”

大氣預報領域的世界領導者是歐洲中期天氣預報中心。比較測試經常表明，它的預測在準確性上超過了所有其他預測。

DeepMind 測試了其新的人工智能, 比對該中心的集合預測系統 - 35 個國家依靠該服務來產生自己的天氣預報。該團隊比較了兩個系統的 15 天預測, 即去預測一組指定的 1,320 個全球風速、溫度和其他大氣方面的特徵表現。

《自然》雜誌的報告稱，新工智能體在時間上裡超越了中心的預測97.2%。作者寫道人, 工智能成就 “有助於開啟業務天氣預報的新篇章。”

人工智能歐洲中期天氣預報中心的專家Matthew Chantry表示，他的機構已經採用了其中的一些功能。

他說:“這就是我們對它的高度評價”。Chantry博士補充說，總的來說，機器學習正在加速人類戰勝一些自然界最致命威脅的努力。

DeepMind 的天氣預報進展, 是在該公司的其他研究人員分享了諾貝爾化學獎後兩個月出現。這科學新知與大眾對恐懼人工智能會竊取工, 作並將人類推向淘汰的邊緣形成了鮮明的對比。

地球大氣層的自然混亂意味著所有天氣預報，包括兩週的天氣預報，隨著對未來的預測越來越長，可靠性變得越來越低。即便如此，AccuWeather 仍提供 90 天的天氣預報。 《老農年鑑》說它可以展望未來 60 天。

DeepMind 在世界領先的科學期刊之一《自然》上提供了數頁證據來支持其為期 15 天的聲明。同樣，谷歌發布了一個線上博客，詳細介紹了人工智能的進步。

新的 GenCast 採用了與主流預測完全不同的方法，主流預測使用房間大小的超級計算機，將數百萬個全球觀測和計算轉化為預測。相反，DeepMind 新的智能體在較小的機器上運行，研究過去的大氣模式，以了解導致地球天氣的微妙動態。

DeepMind 團隊使用歐洲中心整理的大量天氣資料檔案對 GenCast 進行了培訓。訓練時間從1979年到2018年，即共40年。然後，團隊測試了該智能體預測 2019 年天氣的能力。

這種培訓可以增強所有類型的生成人工智能的能力 - 即有創意的那種。它模仿人類的學習方式，在海量資料中發現模式，然後製作具有相似特徵的新的原創材料。

（待續）

Note:

In English, if someone runs rings around you, they are very much better, faster, or more successful at something than you are.