The American company IBM and NASA, the United States space agency, signed last Wednesday (1st) a collaboration agreement to use artificial intelligence in the investigation of impacts caused by climate change. It’s basically the effort to create a kind of “ChatGPT of the weather” so to speak.
No, it will not be an application that, when asked, will give articulate and funny text answers about climate issues. But it will be an equivalent, only for geospatial data, of the artificial intelligence that has gained fame in recent times.
ChatGPT is a model of natural language processing – basically a system trained with huge amounts of data (in this case, text) to produce responses that bring it as close as possible to the fluency with which humans themselves communicate.
The project that brings together IBM and NASA will be similar, also a foundational model of AI, but instead of focusing on language, it will be trained with immense amounts of data from satellites of the American space agency. It is the first time that the technology of AI foundational models will be applied to Earth observation products from the satellite fleet that NASA maintains in orbit, the Landsat and Sentinel-2 series.
From a mountain of petabytes of data that human beings would not have a chance to fully delve into, the system will be able to identify changes in the location of natural disasters, in addition to establishing yield parameters for agricultural crops and checking the health of natural habitats, among other applications. In summary, the system will serve to monitor in detail everything that happens on the planet and can be observed from space.
The cooperation also foresees the use of a natural language model created by IBM, similar to ChatGPT, but to deal with the geosciences literature. He was trained with nearly 300,000 scientific articles and will be able to help NASA researchers find new information and references relevant to their work.
The two partners are also considering building a third foundational AI model focused on climate predictions, an application that could become very important in light of the challenges posed by the ongoing climate crisis. With them, it will be possible to gain even greater precision in efforts to mitigate the effects of global warming, as well as in understanding how the planet will evolve in the face of our efforts (known to be incipient at the moment) to contain harmful transformations by reducing emissions. of greenhouse gases.
As you can see, advanced artificial intelligence, which for decades was nothing more than a futuristic speculation, is reaching a point where it will affect all branches of human activity. It’s hard to predict what all the impacts will be, except that they will be colossal and that they will forever change how we view humanity itself – as well as the planet it inhabits and transforms.
This column is published on Mondays in Folha Corrida.
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I have worked in the news industry for over 10 years and have been an author at News Bulletin 247 for the past 5 years. I mostly cover technology news and enjoy writing about the latest gadgets and devices. I am also a huge fan of music and enjoy attending live concerts whenever possible.
