Google updates its weather forecasts with a new AI model

The company’s AI-enhanced forecasts have proven themselves to be quite accurate so far. AI weather models have also been able to make predictions faster and more efficiently than conventional physics-based models. Until now, Google’s work in this area has been mostly experimental. Now, it’s making those predictions a selling point for Google products and services.

“We’re taking it out of the lab and really putting it into the hands of users in more ways than we have before and sort of shedding off the experimental kind of designation because we have confidence that our forecasts are really quite effective and quite useful,” Peter Battaglia, senior director of research and sustainability at Google DeepMind, said in a briefing with reporters.

The new AI model, WeatherNext 2, can generate forecasts eight times faster than Google’s previous model, and is also more accurate in predicting 99.9…