what’s perhaps most striking about GenCast is that it requires significantly less computing power than traditional physics-based ensemble forecasts like ENS. According to Google, a single one of its TPU v5 tensor processing units can produce a 15-day GenCast forecast in eight minutes. By contrast, it can take a supercomputer with tens of thousands of processors hours to produce a physics-based forecast.

If true this is extremely impressive, but this is their own evaluation, so it may be biased.

Yeah, I've long thought that weather forecasts are a perfect use case for AI. AI is great with complicated systems that are hard to model accurately but have lots of available data.

Current weather forecasts kinda suck. I try to schedule jobs around when it's going to rain, and have to frequently reschedule because rain forecasts aren't very accurate. I really hope we can see improvements.