The research team at Weather from Microsoft Start is developing AI-powered weather models. These models will be able to predict 30-day weather forecasts more accurately. While Microsoft Start has been lauded for their work in the past, they seem to keep up the good work.

Notably, Weather from Microsoft Start was honored with the title of the World’s most accurate global forecast provider. ForecastWatch, a US-based weather forecast monitoring company honored the team with the title back in March last year.

On 3rd May 2024, Microsoft took to Bing blogs to inform that the Start team published an article on the ArXiv website regarding the new medium-range weather forecast model.

Microsoft’s new AI weather modeling is better than the current ones used by the ECMWF

The published article explains how AI weather models compare to the latest state-of-the-art European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF).

Microsoft in its recent Bing blogs says that instead of using a single AI model, it combined five different trained models. This includes three other deep learning architecture together which ensures weather forecasting of one month in advance.

The company further adds that these AI models can learn from decades of weather to understand the pattern to accurately predict the weather in advance. Talking more on the same, Microsoft adds:

They operate in much the same way as an NWP model, though: given the current state of the atmosphere on a 3-D globe (latitude, longitude, and height), predict the state of the atmosphere for some future time, say one hour later. They then feed this prediction back into the model to predict two hours later, and so on.

The new AI models can predict the weather much faster and can only take minutes using a GPU. This allows models to run much more frequently ensuring better weather forecasting.

The new weather forecasting AI model developed by the Start team can measure temperature errors more effectively. Microsoft says:

The results are quite encouraging: when measuring temperature errors using the Continuous Ranked Probability Score (CRPS) metric, our out-of-the-box AI ensemble outperforms the ECMWF model by 17% for one-week forecasts and 4% for four-week forecasts (Figure 1).

Overall, the latest AI weather models could potentially bring major improvements to weather forecasting of above ten days. Hence, it is adding the 30-day weather forecasts to its ever-growing Microsoft Start weather modeling.

You can check out more details here.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) engineers at top tech companies around the globe are reportedly experiencing burnout. Well, it seems the ongoing AI race is to blame.

Back in November 2022 when OpenAI unveiled ChatGPT, it sparked a race among global tech giants to launch their AI services as fast as they can.

Top tech giants including Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and more are the notable ones trying their best. But with a potential cost – burnout of their AI engineers.

The ongoing AI race is taking a toll on engineers at major tech companies

A dedicated report on burnout among AI engineers was first published by CNBC on May 3, 2024. The news agency reports that it received several messages from AI engineers.

Reportedly, the messages claim the superiors in such companies are pressing them too hard to get AI-related products released.

Some other claims made by these AI engineers are enough to raise your eyebrows about some of the companies running the AI race.

Microsoft is running an “AI rat race” according to its engineer

One name that emerged in the report was none other than Microsoft. In a message to CNBC, one of the Microsoft engineers tipped that the company is competing in an “AI rat race.”

That’s not all, the engineer further adds that the tech giant prefers speed over ethics and safety. And, it is pushing too hard so that it can quickly launch its AI products released in the market.

When the news agency reached Microsoft to get a comment on the same, there was no response. Interestingly, all these claims came right after Microsoft published its first responsible AI transparency report.

Amazon is also prioritizing ‘speed’ like Microsoft over everything else to launch its AI products as soon as possible

Amazon is reportedly another company that has been pushing its AI engineers too hard resulting in burnout. One anonymous engineer told CNBC about a bizarre incident from late last year. CNBC narrates the engineer’s words and reports:

Late last year, an artificial intelligence engineer at Amazon was wrapping up the work week and getting ready to spend time with some friends visiting from out of town. Then, a Slack message popped up. He suddenly had a deadline to deliver a project by 6 a.m. on Monday.

There went the weekend. The AI engineer bailed on his friends, who had traveled from the East Coast to the Seattle area. Instead, he worked day and night to finish the job. But it was all for nothing. The project was ultimately “deprioritized,”

Amazon’s AI engineer who talked about burnout also says that the company is doing the same thing as Microsoft and trying to launch AI products faster without giving testing and accuracy much priority.

When CNBC reached out to get a comment, an Amazon spokesperson replied via an email and said the company is focused on building and deploying useful, reliable, and secure generative AI innovations that reinvent and enhance customers’ experiences.

The spokesperson’s email to CNBC also talks about the engineer’s experience which reads:

It’s inaccurate and misleading to use a single employee’s anecdote to characterize the experience of all Amazon employees working in AI.

While the above examples only include Amazon and Microsoft, AI engineers at Apple and Google are also experiencing burnout resulting from immense work pressure, short deadlines, lack of resources, etc.

Microsoft has recently partnered with Vancouver-based robotics startup Sanctuary AI to develop AI models for general-purpose humanoid robots. This also includes the recently unveiled Phoenix robot by Sanctuary AI.

The company further added that the collaboration would help it achieve the mission of creating the world’s first human-like intelligence in general-purpose robots. The news comes months after Microsoft invested in Figure, a rival company to Sanctuary AI.

Sanctuary AI will leverage Microsoft’s Azure infrastructure to explore the future of general-purpose robots

Both companies will work together to strengthen AI research and development. Sanctuary AI says it will use Microsoft’s Azure in its workloads as it works to build large behavior models (LBMs). LBMs will ground AI in the physical world. And, will further help it understand and learn from real-world experiences.

The robotics startup says that it is leveraging these models for Carbon, Phoenix robots’ AI control system. The said AI control system allows the robot to perform complex tasks as it is based on high-quality behavioral data.

Besides, the company says that Microsoft’s Azure will come in handy for training, inference, networking, and storage. A statement from Geordie Rose, CEO, and Co-Founder, is also published in the announcement post which reads:

Creating systems that think like, and understand us, is one of the biggest civilization-level technical problems and opportunities that we will ever face. A challenge like this requires the best global minds to work together. We’re excited to be working with Microsoft to unlock the next generation of AI models that will power-general purpose robots.

Talking more about the present capabilities of Sanctuary AI’s robots, the robotics startup adds:

The dexterous capabilities of Sanctuary AI’s robots have been tested across 400 customer-defined tasks across 15 different industries, with a focus on automotive, manufacturing, and logistics.

Ashley Llorens, Corporate Vice President and Managing Director, Microsoft Research, also states:

We’re excited to be working with Sanctuary AI to accelerate AI model innovation and embodied AI research in areas like reasoning, planning, and human-agent collaboration.

Microsoft also says that by leveraging Azure resources Sanctuary AI can explore the future of general-purpose robots that can be useful in different industries.