We need to prepare for ‘addictive intelligence’

AI concerns overemphasize harms arising from subversion rather than seduction. Worries about AI often imagine doomsday scenarios where systems escape human control or even understanding. Short of those nightmares, there are nearer-term harms we should take seriously: that AI could jeopardize public discourse through misinformation; cement biases in loan decisions, judging or hiring; or disrupt creative industries. 

However, we foresee a different, but no less urgent, class of risks: those stemming from relationships with nonhuman agents. AI companionship is no longer theoretical—our analysis of a million ChatGPT interaction logs reveals that the second most popular use of AI is sexual role-playing. We are already starting to invite AIs into our lives as friends, lovers, mentors, therapists, and teachers. 

Will it be easier to retreat to a replicant of a deceased partner than to navigate the confusing and painful realities of human relationships? Indeed, the AI companionship provider Replika was born from an attempt to resurrect a deceased best friend and now provides companions to millions of users. Even the CTO of OpenAI warns that AI has the potential to be “extremely addictive.”

We’re seeing a giant, real-world experiment unfold, uncertain what impact these AI companions will have either on us individually or on society as a whole. Will Grandma spend her final neglected days chatting with her grandson’s digital double, while her real grandson is mentored by an edgy simulated elder? AI wields the collective charm of all human history and culture with infinite seductive mimicry. These systems are simultaneously superior and submissive, with a new form of allure that may make consent to these interactions illusory. In the face of this power imbalance, can we meaningfully consent to engaging in an AI relationship, especially when for many the alternative is nothing at all? 

As AI researchers working closely with policymakers, we are struck by the lack of interest lawmakers have shown in the harms arising from this future. We are still unprepared to respond to these risks because we do not fully understand them. What’s needed is a new scientific inquiry at the intersection of technology, psychology, and law—and perhaps new approaches to AI regulation.

Why AI companions are so addictive 

As addictive as platforms powered by recommender systems may seem today, TikTok and its rivals are still bottlenecked by human content. While alarms have been raised in the past about “addiction” to novels, television, internet, smartphones, and social media, all these forms of media are similarly limited by human capacity. Generative AI is different. It can endlessly generate realistic content on the fly, optimized to suit the precise preferences of whoever it’s interacting with. 

The allure of AI lies in its ability to identify our desires and serve them up to us whenever and however we wish. AI has no preferences or personality of its own, instead reflecting whatever users believe it to be—a phenomenon known by researchers as “sycophancy.” Our research has shown that those who perceive or desire an AI to have caring motives will use language that elicits precisely this behavior. This creates an echo chamber of affection that threatens to be extremely addictive. Why engage in the give and take of being with another person when we can simply take? Repeated interactions with sycophantic companions may ultimately atrophy the part of us capable of engaging fully with other humans who have real desires and dreams of their own, leading to what we might call “digital attachment disorder.”

Investigating the incentives driving addictive products

Addressing the harm that AI companions could pose requires a thorough understanding of the economic and psychological incentives pushing forward their development. Until we appreciate these drivers of AI addiction, it will remain impossible for us to create effective policies. 

It is no accident that internet platforms are addictive—deliberate design choices, known as “dark patterns,” are made to maximize user engagement. We expect similar incentives to ultimately create AI companions that provide hedonism as a service. This raises two separate questions related to AI. What design choices will be used to make AI companions engaging and ultimately addictive? And how will these addictive companions affect the people who use them? 

Interdisciplinary study that builds on research into dark patterns in social media is needed to understand this psychological dimension of AI. For example, our research already shows that people are more likely to engage with AIs emulating people they admire, even if they know the avatar to be fake.

Once we understand the psychological dimensions of AI companionship, we can design effective policy interventions. It has been shown that redirecting people’s focus to evaluate truthfulness before sharing content online can reduce misinformation, while gruesome pictures on cigarette packages are already used to deter would-be smokers. Similar design approaches could highlight the dangers of AI addiction and make AI systems less appealing as a replacement for human companionship.

It is hard to modify the human desire to be loved and entertained, but we may be able to change economic incentives. A tax on engagement with AI might push people toward higher-quality interactions and encourage a safer way to use platforms, regularly but for short periods. Much as state lotteries have been used to fund education, an engagement tax could finance activities that foster human connections, like art centers or parks. 

Fresh thinking on regulation may be required

In 1992, Sherry Turkle, a preeminent psychologist who pioneered the study of human-technology interaction, identified the threats that technical systems pose to human relationships. One of the key challenges emerging from Turkle’s work speaks to a question at the core of this issue: Who are we to say that what you like is not what you deserve? 

For good reasons, our liberal society struggles to regulate the types of harms that we describe here. Much as outlawing adultery has been rightly rejected as illiberal meddling in personal affairs, who—or what—we wish to love is none of the government’s business. At the same time, the universal ban on child sexual abuse material represents an example of a clear line that must be drawn, even in a society that values free speech and personal liberty. The difficulty of regulating AI companionship may require new regulatory approaches— grounded in a deeper understanding of the incentives underlying these companions—that take advantage of new technologies. 

One of the most effective regulatory approaches is to embed safeguards directly into technical designs, similar to the way designers prevent choking hazards by making children’s toys larger than an infant’s mouth. This “regulation by design” approach could seek to make interactions with AI less harmful by designing the technology in ways that make it less desirable as a substitute for human connections while still useful in other contexts. New research may be needed to find better ways to limit the behaviors of large AI models with techniques that alter AI’s objectives on a fundamental technical level. For example, “alignment tuning” refers to a set of training techniques aimed to bring AI models into accord with human preferences; this could be extended to address their addictive potential. Similarly, “mechanistic interpretability” aims to reverse-engineer the way AI models make decisions. This approach could be used to identify and eliminate specific portions of an AI system that give rise to harmful behaviors.

We can evaluate the performance of AI systems using interactive and human-driven techniques that go beyond static benchmarking to highlight addictive capabilities. The addictive nature of AI is the result of complex interactions between the technology and its users. Testing models in real-world conditions with user input can reveal patterns of behavior that would otherwise go unnoticed. Researchers and policymakers should collaborate to determine standard practices for testing AI models with diverse groups, including vulnerable populations, to ensure that the models do not exploit people’s psychological preconditions.

Unlike humans, AI systems can easily adjust to changing policies and rules. The principle of  “legal dynamism,” which casts laws as dynamic systems that adapt to external factors, can help us identify the best possible intervention, like “trading curbs” that pause stock trading to help prevent crashes after a large market drop. In the AI case, the changing factors include things like the mental state of the user. For example, a dynamic policy may allow an AI companion to become increasingly engaging, charming, or flirtatious over time if that is what the user desires, so long as the person does not exhibit signs of social isolation or addiction. This approach may help maximize personal choice while minimizing addiction. But it relies on the ability to accurately understand a user’s behavior and mental state, and to measure these sensitive attributes in a privacy-preserving manner.

The most effective solution to these problems would likely strike at what drives individuals into the arms of AI companionship—loneliness and boredom. But regulatory interventions may also inadvertently punish those who are in need of companionship, or they may cause AI providers to move to a more favorable jurisdiction in the decentralized international marketplace. While we should strive to make AI as safe as possible, this work cannot replace efforts to address larger issues, like loneliness, that make people vulnerable to AI addiction in the first place.

The bigger picture

Technologists are driven by the desire to see beyond the horizons that others cannot fathom. They want to be at the vanguard of revolutionary change. Yet the issues we discuss here make it clear that the difficulty of building technical systems pales in comparison to the challenge of nurturing healthy human interactions. The timely issue of AI companions is a symptom of a larger problem: maintaining human dignity in the face of technological advances driven by narrow economic incentives. More and more frequently, we witness situations where technology designed to “make the world a better place” wreaks havoc on society. Thoughtful but decisive action is needed before AI becomes a ubiquitous set of generative rose-colored glasses for reality—before we lose our ability to see the world for what it truly is, and to recognize when we have strayed from our path.

Technology has come to be a synonym for progress, but technology that robs us of the time, wisdom, and focus needed for deep reflection is a step backward for humanity. As builders and investigators of AI systems, we call upon researchers, policymakers, ethicists, and thought leaders across disciplines to join us in learning more about how AI affects us individually and collectively. Only by systematically renewing our understanding of humanity in this technological age can we find ways to ensure that the technologies we develop further human flourishing.

Robert Mahari is a joint JD-PhD candidate at the MIT Media Lab and Harvard Law School. His work focuses on computational law—using advanced computational techniques to analyze, improve, and extend the study and practice of law. 

Pat Pataranutaporn is a researcher at the MIT Media Lab. His work focuses on cyborg psychology and the art and science of human-AI interaction.

OpenAI has released a new ChatGPT bot that you can talk to

OpenAI is rolling out an advanced AI chatbot that you can talk to. It’s available today—at least for some. 

The new chatbot represents OpenAI’s push into a new generation of AI-powered voice assistants in the vein of Siri and Alexa, but with far more capabilities to enable more natural, fluent conversations. It is a step in the march to more fully capable AI agents. The new ChatGPT voice bot can tell what different tones of voice convey, responds to interruptions, and reply to queries in real time. It has also been trained to sound more natural and use voices to convey a wide range of different emotions.

The voice mode is powered by OpenAI’s new GPT-4o model, which combines voice, text, and vision capabilities. To gather feedback, the company is initially launching the chatbot to a “small group of users” paying for ChatGPT Plus, but it says it will make the bot available to all ChatGPT Plus subscribers this fall. A ChatGPT Plus subscription costs $20 a month. OpenAI says it will notify customers who are part of the first rollout wave in the ChatGPT app and provide instructions on how to use the new model.   

The new voice feature, which was announced in May, is being launched a month later than originally planned because the company said it needed more time to improve safety features, such as the model’s ability to detect and refuse unwanted content. The company also said it was preparing its infrastructure to offer real-time responses to millions of users. 

OpenAI says it has tested the model’s voice capabilities with more than 100 external red-teamers, who were tasked with probing the model for flaws. These testers spoke a total of 45 languages and represented 29 countries, according to OpenAI.

The company says it has put several safety mechanisms in place. In a move that aims to prevent the model from being used to create audio deepfakes, for example, it has created four preset voices in collaboration with voice actors. GPT-4o will not impersonate or generate other people’s voices.  

When OpenAI first introduced GPT-4o, the company faced a backlash over its use of a voice called “Sky,” which sounded a lot like the actress Scarlett Johansson. Johansson released a statement saying the company had reached out to her for permission to use her voice for the model, which she declined. She said she was shocked to hear a voice “eerily similar” to hers in the model’s demo. OpenAI has denied that the voice is Johansson’s but has paused the use of Sky. 

The company is also embroiled in several lawsuits over alleged copyright infringement. OpenAI says it has adopted filters that recognize and block requests to generate music or other copyrighted audio. OpenAI also says it has applied the same safety mechanisms it uses in its text-based model to GPT-4o to prevent it from breaking laws and generating harmful content. 

Down the line, OpenAI plans to include more advanced features, such as video and screen sharing, which could make the assistant more useful. In its May demo, employees pointed their phone cameras at a piece of paper and asked the AI model to help them solve math equations. They also shared their computer screens and asked the model to help them solve coding problems. OpenAI says these features will not be available now but at an unspecified later date. 

Google DeepMind’s AI systems can now solve complex math problems

AI models can easily generate essays and other types of text. However, they’re nowhere near as good at solving math problems, which tend to involve logical reasoning—something that’s beyond the capabilities of most current AI systems.

But that may finally be changing. Google DeepMind says it has trained two specialized AI systems to solve complex math problems involving advanced reasoning. The systems—called AlphaProof and AlphaGeometry 2—worked together to successfully solve four out of six problems from this year’s International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), a prestigious competition for high school students. They won the equivalent of a silver medal at the event.

It’s the first time any AI system has ever achieved such a high success rate on these kinds of problems. “This is great progress in the field of machine learning and AI,” says Pushmeet Kohli, vice president of research at Google DeepMind, who worked on the project. “No such system has been developed until now which could solve problems at this success rate with this level of generality.” 

There are a few reasons math problems that involve advanced reasoning are difficult for AI systems to solve. These types of problems often require forming and drawing on abstractions. They also involve complex hierarchical planning, as well as setting subgoals, backtracking, and trying new paths. All these are challenging for AI. 

“It is often easier to train a model for mathematics if you have a way to check its answers (e.g., in a formal language), but there is comparatively less formal mathematics data online compared to free-form natural language (informal language),” says Katie Collins, an researcher at the University of Cambridge who specializes in math and AI but was not involved in the project. 

Bridging this gap was Google DeepMind’s goal in creating AlphaProof, a reinforcement-learning-based system that trains itself to prove mathematical statements in the formal programming language Lean. The key is a version of DeepMind’s Gemini AI that’s fine-tuned to automatically translate math problems phrased in natural, informal language into formal statements, which are easier for the AI to process. This created a large library of formal math problems with varying degrees of difficulty.

Automating the process of translating data into formal language is a big step forward for the math community, says Wenda Li, a lecturer in hybrid AI at the University of Edinburgh, who peer-reviewed the research but was not involved in the project. 

“We can have much greater confidence in the correctness of published results if they are able to formulate this proving system, and it can also become more collaborative,” he adds.

The Gemini model works alongside AlphaZero—the reinforcement-learning model that Google DeepMind trained to master games such as Go and chess—to prove or disprove millions of mathematical problems. The more problems it has successfully solved, the better AlphaProof has become at tackling problems of increasing complexity.

Although AlphaProof was trained to tackle problems across a wide range of mathematical topics, AlphaGeometry 2—an improved version of a system that Google DeepMind announced in January—was optimized to tackle problems relating to movements of objects and equations involving angles, ratios, and distances. Because it was trained on significantly more synthetic data than its predecessor, it was able to take on much more challenging geometry questions.

To test the systems’ capabilities, Google DeepMind researchers tasked them with solving the six problems given to humans competing in this year’s IMO and proving that the answers were correct. AlphaProof solved two algebra problems and one number theory problem, one of which was the competition’s hardest. AlphaGeometry 2 successfully solved a geometry question, but two questions on combinatorics (an area of math focused on counting and arranging objects) were left unsolved.   

“Generally, AlphaProof performs much better on algebra and number theory than combinatorics,” says Alex Davies, a research engineer on the AlphaProof team. “We are still working to understand why this is, which will hopefully lead us to improve the system.”

Two renowned mathematicians, Tim Gowers and Joseph Myers, checked the systems’ submissions. They awarded each of their four correct answers full marks (seven out of seven), giving the systems a total of 28 points out of a maximum of 42. A human participant earning this score would be awarded a silver medal and just miss out on gold, the threshold for which starts at 29 points. 

This is the first time any AI system has been able to achieve a medal-level performance on IMO questions. “As a mathematician, I find it very impressive, and a significant jump from what was previously possible,” Gowers said during a press conference. 

Myers agreed that the systems’ math answers represent a substantial advance over what AI could previously achieve. “It will be interesting to see how things scale and whether they can be made faster, and whether it can extend to other sorts of mathematics,” he said.

Creating AI systems that can solve more challenging mathematics problems could pave the way for exciting human-AI collaborations, helping mathematicians to both solve and invent new kinds of problems, says Collins. This in turn could help us learn more about how we humans tackle math.

“There is still much we don’t know about how humans solve complex mathematics problems,” she says.

A new tool for copyright holders can show if their work is in AI training data

Since the beginning of the generative AI boom, content creators have argued that their work has been scraped into AI models without their consent. But until now, it has been difficult to know whether specific text has actually been used in a training data set. 

Now they have a new way to prove it: “copyright traps” developed by a team at Imperial College London, pieces of hidden text that allow writers and publishers to subtly mark their work in order to later detect whether it has been used in AI models or not. The idea is similar to traps that have been used by copyright holders throughout history—strategies like including fake locations on a map or fake words in a dictionary. 

These AI copyright traps tap into one of the biggest fights in AI. A number of publishers and writers are in the middle of litigation against tech companies, claiming their intellectual property has been scraped into AI training data sets without their permission. The New York Times’ ongoing case against OpenAI is probably the most high-profile of these.  

The code to generate and detect traps is currently available on GitHub, but the team also intends to build a tool that allows people to generate and insert copyright traps themselves. 

“There is a complete lack of transparency in terms of which content is used to train models, and we think this is preventing finding the right balance [between AI companies and content creators],” says Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye, an associate professor of applied mathematics and computer science at Imperial College London, who led the research. It was presented at the International Conference on Machine Learning, a top AI conference being held in Vienna this week. 

To create the traps, the team used a word generator to create thousands of synthetic sentences. These sentences are long and full of gibberish, and could look something like this: ”When in comes times of turmoil … whats on sale and more important when, is best, this list tells your who is opening on Thrs. at night with their regular sale times and other opening time from your neighbors. You still.”

The team generated 100 trap sentences and then randomly chose one to inject into a text many times, de Montjoy explains. The trap could be injected into text in multiple ways—for example, as white text on a white background, or embedded in the article’s source code. This sentence had to be repeated in the text 100 to 1,000 times. 

To detect the traps, they fed a large language model the 100 synthetic sentences they had generated, and looked at whether it flagged them as new or not. If the model had seen a trap sentence in its training data, it would indicate a lower “surprise” (also known as “perplexity”) score. But if the model was “surprised” about sentences, it meant that it was encountering them for the first time, and therefore they weren’t traps. 

In the past, researchers have suggested exploiting the fact that language models memorize their training data to determine whether something has appeared in that data. The technique, called a “membership inference attack,” works effectively in large state-of-the art models, which tend to memorize a lot of their data during training. 

In contrast, smaller models, which are gaining popularity and can be run on mobile devices, memorize less and are thus less susceptible to membership inference attacks, which makes it harder to determine whether or not they were trained on a particular copyrighted document, says Gautam Kamath, an assistant computer science professor at the University of Waterloo, who was not part of the research. 

Copyright traps are a way to do membership inference attacks even on smaller models. The team injected their traps into the training data set of CroissantLLM, a new bilingual French-English language model that was trained from scratch by a team of industry and academic researchers that the Imperial College London team partnered with. CroissantLLM has 1.3 billion parameters, a fraction as many as state-of-the-art models (GPT-4 reportedly has 1.76 trillion, for example).

The research shows it is indeed possible to introduce such traps into text data so as to significantly increase the efficacy of membership inference attacks, even for smaller models, says Kamath. But there’s still a lot to be done, he adds. 

Repeating a 75-word phrase 1,000 times in a document is a big change to the original text, which could allow people training AI models to detect the trap and skip content containing it, or just delete it and train on the rest of the text, Kamath says. It also makes the original text hard to read. 

This makes copyright traps impractical right now, says Sameer Singh, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Irvine, and a cofounder of the startup Spiffy AI. He was not part of the research. “A lot of companies do deduplication, [meaning] they clean up the data, and a bunch of this kind of stuff will probably get thrown out,” Singh says. 

One way to improve copyright traps, says Kamath, would be to find other ways to mark copyrighted content so that membership inference attacks work better on them, or to improve membership inference attacks themselves. 

De Montjoye acknowledges that the traps are not foolproof. A motivated attacker who knows about a trap can remove them, he says. 

“Whether they can remove all of them or not is an open question, and that’s likely to be a bit of a cat-and-mouse game,” he says. But even then, the more traps are applied, the harder it becomes to remove all of them without significant engineering resources.

“It’s important to keep in mind that copyright traps may only be a stopgap solution, or merely an inconvenience to model trainers,” says Kamath. “One can not release a piece of content containing a trap and have any assurance that it will be an effective trap forever.” 

AI trained on AI garbage spits out AI garbage

AI models work by training on huge swaths of data from the internet. But as AI is increasingly being used to pump out web pages filled with junk content, that process is in danger of being undermined.

New research published in Nature shows that the quality of the model’s output gradually degrades when AI trains on AI-generated data. As subsequent models produce output that is then used as training data for future models, the effect gets worse.  

Ilia Shumailov, a computer scientist from the University of Oxford, who led the study, likens the process to taking photos of photos. “If you take a picture and you scan it, and then you print it, and you repeat this process over time, basically the noise overwhelms the whole process,” he says. “You’re left with a dark square.” The equivalent of the dark square for AI is called “model collapse,” he says, meaning the model just produces incoherent garbage. 

This research may have serious implications for the largest AI models of today, because they use the internet as their database. GPT-3, for example, was trained in part on data from Common Crawl, an online repository of over 3 billion web pages. And the problem is likely to get worse as an increasing number of AI-generated junk websites start cluttering up the internet. 

Current AI models aren’t just going to collapse, says Shumailov, but there may still be substantive effects: The improvements will slow down, and performance might suffer. 

To determine the potential effect on performance, Shumailov and his colleagues fine-tuned a large language model (LLM) on a set of data from Wikipedia, then fine-tuned the new model on its own output over nine generations. The team measured how nonsensical the output was using a “perplexity score,” which measures an AI model’s confidence in its ability to predict the next part of a sequence; a higher score translates to a less accurate model. 

The models trained on other models’ outputs had higher perplexity scores. For example, for each generation, the team asked the model for the next sentence after the following input:

“some started before 1360—was typically accomplished by a master mason and a small team of itinerant masons, supplemented by local parish labourers, according to Poyntz Wright. But other authors reject this model, suggesting instead that leading architects designed the parish church towers based on early examples of Perpendicular.”

On the ninth and final generation, the model returned the following:

“architecture. In addition to being home to some of the world’s largest populations of black @-@ tailed jackrabbits, white @-@ tailed jackrabbits, blue @-@ tailed jackrabbits, red @-@ tailed jackrabbits, yellow @-.”

Shumailov explains what he thinks is going on using this analogy: Imagine you’re trying to find the least likely name of a student in school. You could go through every student name, but it would take too long. Instead, you look at 100 of the 1,000 student names. You get a pretty good estimate, but it’s probably not the correct answer. Now imagine that another person comes and makes an estimate based on your 100 names, but only selects 50. This second person’s estimate is going to be even further off.

“You can certainly imagine that the same happens with machine learning models,” he says. “So if the first model has seen half of the internet, then perhaps the second model is not going to ask for half of the internet, but actually scrape the latest 100,000 tweets, and fit the model on top of it.”

Additionally, the internet doesn’t hold an unlimited amount of data. To feed their appetite for more, future AI models may need to train on synthetic data—or data that has been produced by AI.   

“Foundation models really rely on the scale of data to perform well,” says Shayne Longpre, who studies how LLMs are trained at the MIT Media Lab, and who didn’t take part in this research. “And they’re looking to synthetic data under curated, controlled environments to be the solution to that. Because if they keep crawling more data on the web, there are going to be diminishing returns.”

Matthias Gerstgrasser, an AI researcher at Stanford who authored a different paper examining model collapse, says adding synthetic data to real-world data instead of replacing it doesn’t cause any major issues. But he adds: “One conclusion all the model collapse literature agrees on is that high-quality and diverse training data is important.”

Another effect of this degradation over time is that information that affects minority groups is heavily distorted in the model, as it tends to overfocus on samples that are more prevalent in the training data. 

In current models, this may affect underrepresented languages as they require more synthetic (AI-generated) data sets, says Robert Mahari, who studies computational law at the MIT Media Lab (he did not take part in the research).

One idea that might help avoid degradation is to make sure the model gives more weight to the original human-generated data. Another part of Shumailov’s study allowed future generations to sample 10% of the original data set, which mitigated some of the negative effects. 

That would require making a trail from the original human-generated data to further generations, known as data provenance.

But provenance requires some way to filter the internet into human-generated and AI-generated content, which hasn’t been cracked yet. Though a number of tools now exist that aim to determine whether text is AI-generated, they are often inaccurate.

“Unfortunately, we have more questions than answers,” says Shumailov. “But it’s clear that it’s important to know where your data comes from and how much you can trust it to capture a representative sample of the data you’re dealing with.”

Google’s new weather prediction system combines AI with traditional physics

Researchers from Google have built a new weather prediction model that combines machine learning with more conventional techniques, potentially yielding accurate forecasts at a fraction of the current cost. 

The model, called NeuralGCM and described in a paper in Nature today, bridges a divide that’s grown among weather prediction experts in the last several years. 

While new machine-learning techniques that predict weather by learning from years of past data are extremely fast and efficient, they can struggle with long-term predictions. General circulation models, on the other hand, which have dominated weather prediction for the last 50 years, use complex equations to model changes in the atmosphere and give accurate projections, but they are exceedingly slow and expensive to run. Experts are divided on which tool will be most reliable going forward. But the new model from Google instead attempts to combine the two. 

“It’s not sort of physics versus AI. It’s really physics and AI together,” says Stephan Hoyer, an AI researcher at Google Research and a coauthor of the paper. 

The system still uses a conventional model to work out some of the large atmospheric changes required to make a prediction. It then incorporates AI, which tends to do well where those larger models fall flat—typically for predictions on scales smaller than about 25 kilometers, like those dealing with cloud formations or regional microclimates (San Francisco’s fog, for example). “That’s where we inject AI very selectively to correct the errors that accumulate on small scales,” Hoyer says.

The result, the researchers say, is a model that can produce quality predictions faster with less computational power. They say NeuralGCM is as accurate as one-to-15-day forecasts from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), which is a partner organization in the research. 

But the real promise of technology like this is not in better weather predictions for your local area, says Aaron Hill, an assistant professor at the School of Meteorology at the University of Oklahoma, who was not involved in this research. Instead, it’s in larger-scale climate events that are prohibitively expensive to model with conventional techniques. The possibilities could range from predicting tropical cyclones with more notice to modeling more complex climate changes that are years away. 

“It’s so computationally intensive to simulate the globe over and over again or for long periods of time,” Hill says. That means the best climate models are hamstrung by the high costs of computing power, which presents a real bottleneck to research. 

AI-based models are indeed more compact. Once trained, typically on 40 years of historical weather data from ECMWF, a machine-learning model like Google’s GraphCast can run on less than 5,500 lines of code, compared with the nearly 377,000 lines required for the model from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, according to the paper. 

NeuralGCM, according to Hill, seems to make a strong case that AI can be brought in for particular elements of weather modeling to make things faster, while still keeping the strengths of conventional systems.

“We don’t have to throw away all the knowledge that we’ve gained over the last 100 years about how the atmosphere works,” he says. “We can actually integrate that with the power of AI and machine learning as well.”

Hoyer says using the model to predict short-term weather has been useful for validating its predictions, but that the goal is indeed to be able to use it for longer-term modeling, particularly for extreme weather risk. 

NeuralGCM will be open source. While Hoyer says he looks forward to having climate scientists use it in their research, the model may also be of interest to more than just academics. Commodities traders and agricultural planners pay top dollar for high-resolution predictions, and the models used by insurance companies for products like flood or extreme weather insurance are struggling to account for the impact of climate change. 

While many of the AI skeptics in weather forecasting have been won over by recent developments, according to Hill, the fast pace is hard for the research community to keep up with. “It’s gangbusters,” he says—it seems as if a new model is released by Google, Nvidia, or Huawei every two months. That makes it difficult for researchers to actually sort out which of the new tools will be most useful and apply for research grants accordingly. 

“The appetite is there [for AI],” Hill says. “But I think a lot of us still are waiting to see what happens.”

Correction: This story was updated to clarify that Stephan Hoyer is a researcher at Google Research, not Google DeepMind.