Google’s latest AI weather model gives you no excuse to forget your umbrella

While LLMs get the bulk of the attention, the transformer revolution in meteorology has been just as important. European and US weather agencies are already using AI models in their forecast products, and their speed and low cost promise to bring economic impact to poorer regions where the expense of high-quality sensors and supercomputers has put accurate forecasts out of reach.

Bill Gates recently cited AI-powered weather forecasting as a crucial benefit of the technology, with better forecasts improving crop yields in developing countries. Alet, the DeepMind researcher, said that higher-resolution forecasts of wind, rain, and cloud cover will be useful to make renewable energy projects more dependable.

“At the end of the day, I think Google is about providing useful information to the user, and a lot of what users are looking for has to do with the weather in some way or another,” Alet said.