Scientists at Google DeepMind and Google Research released a new artificial intelligence model for weather forecasting today that sees our changing atmosphere more clearly and predicts its behavior more often. WeatherNext 3 is the latest wave of a sea change in meteorology brought out by deep learning techniques, and Google says it will start feeding into weather information users see in search, Google Maps, and Gemini, as well as being available to users and researchers on Google's cloud platforms. The new model has already proven to be the most accurate among leading contenders tested on Operational WeatherBench, a utility for comparing AI forecasts built by the startup Brightband. It looks at metrics like temperature, windspeed, and humidity. As well as beating out other deep-learning models built by Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, and the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF), it also beats traditional forecasts from the U.S. National Weather service and the ECMWF. Most weather forecasts come from government-owned supercomputers laboriously churning through mathematical equations written to describe the physics of weather; while these systems have become remarkably accurate, they are expensive and comparatively slow. After the ECMWF released more than half a century of weather data produced by these systems in 2018, deep learning researchers began training models that could make predictions far more quickly and with comparable accuracy to government tools....

Self-driving cars are often controlled by deep learning models that sometimes fail in unexpected situations. For instance, the car might inexplicably brake and block the path of an oncoming emergency vehicle. A human driver or passenger may need to react rapidly to prevent a collision. To help humans better anticipate a vehicle's mistakes, researchers from MIT and autonomous vehicle technology company Motional developed a new method that provides clear explanations of the underlying model's decisions. Usually, the internal reasoning process of a deep learning model is opaque and difficult to understand. But the new method, called the Concept-Wrapper Network (CW-Net), translates that reasoning process into concepts that faithfully describe the autonomous vehicle's decisions without altering its driving performance. CW-Net explains the decisions of machine learning-based planners using understandable concepts, like 'approaching stopped vehicle' or 'close to cyclist.' These explanations can correct misconceptions drivers and passengers have about vehicle behavior and improve their situational awareness....

The new deep learning techniques behind LLMs have also given us weather simulations that can run on laptops instead of supercomputers, changing meteorology. But the bigger task for AI may be making it easier for people and organizations to put those forecasts to work. WindBorne Systems, a startup that collects data with the world's longest-flying weather balloons and feeds it into a powerful forecasting model, has raised a $37 million Series B round to take on that challenge, CEO John Dean told TechCrunch. The new round was co-led by Khosla Ventures and Galvanize, with additional investments from Translink Capital, Lux Capital, and previous investors, and values the company after this round of funding at $250 million. Founded in 2019, WindBorne started with a plan to acquire a novel set of weather data with its low-cost weather sensors and endurance balloons. The development of AI weather forecasting models in the last four years has allowed them to make their own forecasts, something that wasn't previously possible for most private companies because of the cost of the supercomputers previously required to simulate the atmosphere....

A new research study reveals that broad availability of AI-generated adult content may have led to sharp increases in sexual criminality. An analysis of detailed crime data released by Japan's National Police Agency found that in periods of peak engagement with material tagged as AI-generated and adults-only, there were statistically significant increases in rape. This may point to looming reputational and legal risk for companies providing tools and venues for such content. The online revolution enabled frictionless access to virtually every type of content ' including adult content. Generative AI has added a whole new, and potentially more dangerous, dimension to the boom in explicit content. In the absence of strong safeguards, AI users can transition from consumers to creators of their own explicit media with shocking ease and speed. National governments around the world as well as the U.N. have issued grave warnings about wide-scale production of AI-generated illegal deepfakes, including images involving minors....