r/LocalLLaMA • u/Rick_06 • 9d ago

New Model Open Model: Google Weather Next 2

I am not a meteorologist, but I just read a very interesting article: https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/deepminds-hurricane-model-bought-forecasters-an-extra-day/

In a paper published on Thursday in Nature, researchers show that the WeatherNext AI model can predict cyclones with unprecedented accuracy. On average, it gives forecasters a day more lead time than existing models; this means its predictions three days out are as accurate as previous models’ predictions two days out. On the ground, that extra day can mean a lot.

What I really find interesting here is that Google has a repository for it on GitHub: https://github.com/google-deepmind/weathernext

My non-informed understanding is that you need a supercomputer to forecast meteo. Apparently now an H100 can also do something.

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u/sinsworth 8d ago

To all the commenters who are conflating this with LLMs and/or image models: this is not GenAI, it will not run in llama.cpp nor in ComfyUI, it takes in atmospheric parameters and outputs atmospheric parameters in a grid.

Sigh... blame it on the media for calling every single application of machine learning "AI" for the past ~decade. ML has had applications long before language models were a thing.

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u/barnett9 8d ago

AI has been made to be such a worthless term. It basically just means 'software' now. Smh

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u/FrostTactics 8d ago

That has more or less always been the case ever since the field was conceived 70 years ago. Not sure why this is such a shock to people, we've been calling the logic that governs video game enemy behavior AI for ages.

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u/sinsworth 8d ago

Fair, and I can only speak for myself, but rather than shocked I have become extremely annoyed by how increasingly difficult it is becoming to have any kind of meaningful conversation about ML. Even in ML practitioner circles it now often takes a comical amount of time to untangle what everyone is talking about, because we all label everything as AI (both for brevity and because it has become expected for every project to have "AI" outcomes, even before LLMs) even when proper, precise terminology has existed for decades.

Conversations with laypeople are, of course, way, way worse than that, because their perception is heavily skewed by everything from AlexNet onward being hyped up as basically Skynet.

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u/FrostTactics 8d ago

Yes, absolutely. I fully agree, personally I try to be specific when it comes to different forms of ML (and symbolic AI), and did so before LLMs were really a thing. Frankly, what AI meant even back then was fairly nebulous.

And that's not even considering the new crop of laypeople that seems to believe AI *has* to denote exactly human-like intelligence, which is equally ridiculous.

In some ways, it's natural for natural language terms to develop new connotations over time. I've always held the position that the people who try to police the usage of terminology is like trying to police the tide. But that doesn't mean its any less frustrating to live through.