Comment by fcanesin

17 hours ago

Maybe was this that was the last drop for Sundar.

Demis: "I have a new amazing breakthrough"

Sundar: "Great! We really need a answer to Sol and Fable"

Demis: "They are completely owned in typhoon forecasting"

Ironically typhoon forecasting, at this moment, is more valuable. These predictions are matters of life, death, and billions of dollars in damage.

  • You want to know whats cooler than a billion dollars in damage, a trillion dollars in valuation.

  • How does predicting a typhoon prevent billions in damage?

    It could save thousands of lives because people can be evacuated if you can predict a few hours or a day further ahead, or the path more accurately. You can save some damage by moving ships and vehicles.

    But you can't evacuate buildings or infrastructure.

    • You can board up a helluva lot more stuff in a week than in two days. Crucially, you can move more of the most expensive stuff out of the storm surge zone, which is where the biggest damage happens and try to flood proof more of the things which can’t be moved.

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  • I know this is uncharitable and I am wrong but I am having trouble coming up with concrete scenarios where you die with 2 days notice but survive with 3. I am nonethless a believer that more accurate forecasting has value.

    • You can walk 50km in those extra 24 hours which will save your life if you’re in a storm surge area without other means of transportation, which is easily the case when everyone else is evacuating alongside you.

    • Could you imagine a scenario where from warning to complete evacuation takes more than two days? Evacuating a whole area is a hard task, particularly once you start looking at more complex problems (elderly, prisons, hospitals).

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    • The 2 vs 3 days makes less of an impact on personal decision making but has massive benefits for decision making at the country wide response level.

    • It's not uncharitable, because the system doesn't actually claim to give you an extra day of notice. It would be more accurate to say: "the model can reach a given level of forecast accuracy roughly a day farther in advance". So your question becomes: are there scenarios where I am 80% sure this is a Cat 5 hurricane 3 days before, where I would die if I was only 65% sure it was Cat 5 on that same day? The answer is - probably not, because even in the example used in the PR article, the NHC was already issuing strong early guidance 5 days before landfall.

    • I don't think the amount of notice is as important as "this totally is for sure going to wreck you" is. We generally know something is going to hit somewhere at sometime. Which isn't specific enough for everyone to act on

    • Imagine you've got to evacuate a hundred thousand people. That extra day is incredibly valuable.

  • Valuable, agreed. But lucrative?

    • I've always assumed that insurance and/or government departments that would spend money due to storms would be the ones funneling money to these sorts of efforts. It's not exactly something you can easily sell directly to individuals who would benefit. It would be pretty dystopian for them to sell subscriptions for an extra 24 hrs notice on the next typhoon :P

he got promoted to chief scientist and them being an expert at all modeling will really help compared to being llm only