
Quote of the Day: A.I. May Make Weather Forecasting Faster and More Exac
'It doesn't know the laws of physics, so it could make up something completely crazy.'
AMY MCGOVERN, a computer scientist and meteorologist at the University of Oklahoma, on A.I. weather forecasting models, and the limitation they still face.
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Weather Company CEO wants AI to help you know when to walk your dog
Weather Company CEO Rohit Agarwal said that AI brings new opportunities for forecasting but keeping humans in the loop is their "secret sauce" during Axios' AI+ Summit in New York on Wednesday. Why it matters: AI is improving forecasting and has the potential to help combat climate change, boost public safety and offer hyperlocal forecasts. Zoom in: Agarwal said AI has the potential to solve problems for businesses and enterprises that are highly dependent on the weather to serve their customers. For example, Agarwal explored the possibility of telling pet owners the specific day of the week or time of day that walks should take place to keep pets safe. "Wouldn't it be fun if we actually deliver that message to you, knowing that you're likely to have a pet, that you're likely to choose in the morning or afternoon walk, and that you have the type of dog that actually can use a lot of exercise?" Agarwal told Axios' Ashley Gold. But as companies race to adopt the technology, human expertise plays a crucial role. Driving the news: Agarwal said the Weather Company's AI models are one of their "superpowers," along with the human element. "We think that our secret sauce is also how we apply talented scientists and meteorologists to the formula to ensure that there is checks and balances against what those models are effectively communicating and computing so that we can ensure that we are delivering an accurate forecast for our customers," Agarwal said. As the Trump administration takes a sledgehammer to the federal government, including at NOAA and the National Weather Service, Agarwal said the Weather Company leverages relationships with those agencies to deliver "world class forecast data."


Forbes
an hour ago
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Ryan Shepard: The Thrills, Science And Dangers Of Tornado Chasing
Getting uncomfortably close to a tornadic supercell, Colorado, May 2025. As I've written before, storm chasing is all the rage. Like the long lines on Mt. Everest now, hundreds of amateurs have saturated the community, what with advanced weather apps available on cellphones. Many of these amateurs haven't a clue as to what they're doing. They get in the way of serious chasers who do it for science to better understand how tornadoes form and act, and therefore are able to alert the public earlier to save lives. Ryan Shepard, 39 and founder of Storm Of Passion, is one such chaser. Along with his tank-like Tornado Intercept Vehicle (TIV-2), one of only two in the world, and his extensive knowledge of meteorology, he is able to drive into the funnels of twisters and take critical measurements. Following are edited excerpts from a recent conversation. Jim Clash: Why is it so important to penetrate a tornado? Ryan Shepard: The weather models are getting better, but radar can't see what's happening with winds at the surface. Going into, or getting as close to a tornado as possible to take measurements, helps us understand this critical surface component to improve models and get better warnings out to the public. We can do that in the TIV. Clash: Have the recent budget cuts to NOAA, NSF and other weather services impacted your ability to predict storms? Shepard: They have. Tornado warnings have been delayed or even missed. People in that area cite short staffing as part of the problem. The other thing that will play out longer-term is replacement and refurbishment of radar equipment, weather balloons and the like. Storm Of Passion founder Ryan Shepard in his TIV-2, May 2025. Clash: I'm guessing research has been impacted, too? Shepard: Yes, funding has been cut hugely for new research grants. I see less equipment out there and more amateur storm chasers. When I started doing this 18 years ago, Vortex 2 had a $9-million NSF grant supporting 90 vehicles. Now there are maybe three or four. Now ninety may be a bit much, but only four? There is probably some happy medium in-between we could live with. With our TIV research, though, we can hopefully fill in some of that gap. Clash: The TIV has bulletproof windows and armor plating, plus the ability to lower its chassis and deploy anchor legs into the ground. Shepard: Yeah, that's to keep the wind from lifting the vehicle and to protect from debris moving in excess of 200 mph. Even small debris at that speed is like a bullet. Then there's hail, which can be bigger than a softball and stops conventional chasers from getting close. We need that protection to collect our wind data so close to the funnel, or even within it. Clash: Ever had any close calls in your multiple years of chasing? Shepard: It was the end of May 2019 in eastern Kansas. I was guiding for a commercial touring company, and was not in the TIV. We had four passenger vans driving close to a particularly significant supercell. We were heading south to get in front of it again. Storm Of Passion's TIV-2 tornado intercept vehicle, May 2025. It was extremely full of rain, rain-wrapped actually, and that made it impossible to see into it. A second tornado was hiding in that rain downdraft, rated EF-2, not too strong but didn't appear on radar until it was over top of us. The tornado knocked two of our vans off of the road. One rolled three or four times in a field, the other flipped upside-down in a ditch. Thankfully, we only had minor injuries, except one person who suffered a broken vertebrae and had to be airlifted to Kansas City for surgery. We had never seen anything like that before. It scared me even though I was in one of the two vans that stayed upright. I was worried for the others in the tipped vans. Had we been in the TIV, it would have been fine. Clash: What's the difference between adventure and exploration? Shepard: Exploration is discovering something, gathering new data. With adventure, you're just trying to get an experience, walk in someone else's footsteps, like on Mt. Everest today.


TechCrunch
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Hugging Face says its new robotics model is so efficient it can run on a MacBook
It's becoming a little easier to build sophisticated robotics projects at home. AI dev platform Hugging Face released earlier this week an open AI model for robotics called SmolVLA. Trained on 'compatibly licensed,' community-shared datasets, SmolVLA outperforms much larger models for robotics in both virtual and real-world environments, Hugging Face claims. 'SmolVLA aims to democratize access to vision-language-action [VLA] models and accelerate research toward generalist robotic agents,' writes Hugging Face in a blog post. 'SmolVLA is not only a lightweight yet capable model, but also a method for training and evaluating generalist robotics [technologies].' SmolVLA is a part of Hugging Face's rapidly expanding effort to establish an ecosystem of low-cost robotics hardware and software. Last year, the company launched LeRobot, a collection of robotics-focused models, datasets, and tools. More recently, Hugging Face acquired Pollen Robotics, a robotics startup based in France, and unveiled several inexpensive robotics systems, including humanoids, for purchase. SmolVLA, which is 450 million parameters in size, was trained on data from LeRobot Community Datasets, specially-marked robotics datasets shared on Hugging Face's AI development platform. Parameters, sometimes referred to as weights, are the internal components of a model that guide its behavior. Hugging Face claims that SmolVLA is small enough to run on a single consumer GPU — or even a MacBook — and can be tested and deployed on 'affordable' hardware, including the company's own robotics systems. In an interesting twist, SmolVLA also supports an 'asynchronous inference stack,' which Hugging Face says allows the model to separate the processing of a robot's actions from the processing of what it sees and hears. As the company explains in its blog post, '[b]ecause of this separation, robots can respond more quickly in fast-changing environments.' Techcrunch event Save now through June 4 for TechCrunch Sessions: AI Save $300 on your ticket to TC Sessions: AI—and get 50% off a second. Hear from leaders at OpenAI, Anthropic, Khosla Ventures, and more during a full day of expert insights, hands-on workshops, and high-impact networking. These low-rate deals disappear when the doors open on June 5. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you've built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | REGISTER NOW SmolVLA is available for download from Hugging Face. Already, a user on X claims to have used the model to control a third-party robotic arm: 🚀 SmolVLA — feels like a BERT moment for robotics 🤖 I tried it on the Koch Arm: Inference on RTX 2050 (4GB), fine-tuned with just 31 demos, and matches/outperforms single-task baselines 🔥 Big thanks to @RemiCadene @danaubakirova @mustash97 @francesco__capu 🙌 — Xingdong Zuo (@XingdongZ) June 4, 2025 It's worth noting that Hugging Face is far from the only player in the nascent open robotics race. Nvidia has a collection of tools for open robotics, and startup K-Scale Labs is building the components for what it's calling 'open-source humanoids.' Other formidable firms in the segment include Dyna Robotics, Jeff Bezos-backed Physical Intelligence, and RLWRLD.