In early June, shortly after the beginning of the Atlantic hurricane season, Google unveiled a new model designed specifically to forecast the tracks and intensity of tropical cyclones.
Part of the Google DeepMind suite of AI-based weather research models, the “Weather Lab” model for cyclones was a bit of an unknown for meteorologists at its launch. In a blog post at the time, Google said its new model, trained on a vast dataset that reconstructed past weather and a specialized database containing key information about hurricanes tracks, intensity, and size, had performed well during pre-launch testing.
“Internal testing shows that our model’s predictions for cyclone track and intensity are as accurate as, and often more accurate than, current physics-based methods,” the company said.
Google said it would partner with the National Hurricane Center, an arm of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Service that has provided credible forecasts for decades, to assess the performance of its Weather Lab model in the Atlantic and East Pacific basins.
All intelligence is maths. I’d not typically say that all maths is intelligence, but anything that uses maths to respond to its environment in a way that takes inputs and selects an appropriate response is acting intelligently (to some extent).
AI is mostly used (by actual programmers) to refer to any programming technique that uses a training step, eg where the logic is not manually provided, and instead some form of training/learning technique is used.
The exact boundary is a little grey and has shifted over time (nowadays most wouldn’t include something as simple as a symbolic programming, the ai window has shifted further and now just feeding in logical statements and letting the computer resolve their implications doesn’t feel like a big enough step away from basic procedural programming), but the term has a pretty useful meaning nonetheless. If you can read a program and run through the logic in your head it’s not ai, if you are instead teaching the computer to train itself to solve the problems you want solved, then it is ai.
Unless you’re programming computer games, then ai is just anything that functions as an agent in the game world, and probably just means a few if statements. But then again, in computer games “lighting” has nothing to do with photons and “physics” bares little resemblance to the behaviour of real world matter, so it sort of fits that “ai” in games is just some if statements behind a curtain pretending to be clever, that’s just how the sausage is made.