It is true that AI presents many dangers, especially for workers who are replaced by machines and have no professional future ahead. But AI can also be used to save lives, or it could be.
NVIDIA’s GTC, the Conference on GPU Technology, has included this week a debate on the use of accelerated computing to drive environmental sustainability initiatives and climate action.
During his opening speech, Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of the company, stated: “The generative AI revolution is already here. But what else can we generate? What else can we learn? One of the things we would love to learn is the weather. We would love to learn extreme weather. We would love to learn how we can predict future weather on a regional scale, so that we can keep people out of danger before the danger arrives.”
Earth 2, the AI-simulated Earth to save lives
To achieve this, Nvidia has developed the Earth-2 platform, which consists of four independent services. AI-based machine learning models, such as NVIDIA’s FourCastNet, and generative super-resolution models, such as NVIDIA’s CorrDiff. Cloud-based GPU-accelerated simulation. Weather and climate data service from different sources, including static files, AI-based inference results, or numerical simulation results. And, cloud-based interactive visualization of weather and climate data.
Current AI-based weather forecasting models are limited to a resolution of 25 km. CorrDiff reduces that resolution to 2 km at 1,000 times the speed and 3,000 times the energy efficiency of conventional models.
By combining the generative AI of CorrDiff with the speed and accuracy of FourCastNet, hundreds and potentially thousands of regional weather forecasts at kilometer scale can be explored to obtain a clear picture of the impact of extreme weather phenomena.
Another key component of Earth-2 cloud APIs is NVIDIA Omniverse, a platform that enables the development of 3D workflows and applications based on the universal scene description (OpenUSD).
The Weather Company, a global leader in weather data prediction and analysis, plans to integrate its weather data and Weatherverse tools with Omniverse, enabling customers to better understand and visualize the impact of weather conditions for the first time.
Climate action is just one aspect of Nvidia’s goal to accelerate computing in a sustainable way that maximizes energy efficiency and minimizes environmental impact. You can find the full speech by Jensen Huang at the GTC below these words.
