The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
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Battaglia: Data pipelines matter more than neural network architectures today
“I don't feel that neural network architectures these days tend to be the sort of exciting part. It's usually more of like the training and the sort of data how you handle the data and that kind of thing.”
DeepMind uses transformers to model spatial interactions in weather, not time
“We actually use transformers not to model the spatial, the interactions in weather over time, like the sequence of text, but in space.”
Battaglia: AI weather models leverage macroscopic spatial ranges unlike traditional simulations
“In a traditional model, the way it simulates that is it, in very fine detail, it kind of figures out, like, what's the pressure, and the temperature, and the wind, and the moisture, and what are those things? What's going to happen next is determined strictly …”
DeepMind primarily uses traditional supervised learning for AI weather models
“What we use in our weather forecasting models, and a lot of folks out in the community are using it as, you know, as this field is advancing and this AI-based weather forecasting is developing, we're still mostly using fairly traditional machine learning, supe…”
Battaglia: Early ML in weather improved downstream calibration, not base models
“So actually, the first advent of like, AI and machine learning in weather forecasting, or at least some of the earliest, was not, like, trying to overhaul the whole weather forecast process itself, but making, you know, using more and more, like, statistical m…”
Battaglia: Precipitation and wind are harder to forecast due to fine-scale dynamics
“So that type of very high resolution, complex, you know, patterns of precipitation, for example, Wind as well. Those are much harder to predict because you're effectively predicting a lot more information. You can't just sort of summarize it by saying, oh, eve…”
Battaglia: Weather is Markovian unlike text sequences in language models
“Weather is actually different from text in a fundamental way. In fact, most physical processes are. They are what's called Markov, in that the most recent state of the system determines the subsequent state.”
Battaglia: Advanced weather forecasting has massive headroom for electric grid optimization
“But I have a feeling that there's a lot of headroom, a lot more to be gained in how we, you know, plan our, you know, how to operate our electrical grids, how we predict what the electrical demand is going to be.”
Battaglia: Logistics and supply chains have barely tapped AI weather forecasting
“I think that supply chains and logistics and, you know, even just like lots of choices that, you know, driving and these type of things, I think, really could be better informed by better weather forecasts, and I don't think we've even begun to kind of get int…”
Battaglia: Mobile weather apps rely on intermediaries to process NOAA data
“When you look at the app on your phone and you see, you know, the chance of precipitation, that's not coming directly from
[458] Peter Battaglia: NOAA, that's coming from other intermediaries that are, like, taking, you know, local weather station data and oth…”