In September, researchers at Google’s DeepMind AI unit in London were paying unusual attention to the weather across the pond. Hurricane Lee was at least 10 days out from landfall—eons in forecasting terms—and official forecasts were still waffling between the storm landing on major Northeast cities or missing them entirely. DeepMind’s own experimental software had made a very specific prognosis of landfall much farther north. “We were riveted to our seats,” says research scientist Rémi Lam.
A week and a half later, on September 16, Lee struck land right where DeepMind’s software, called GraphCast, had predicted days earlier: Long Island, Nova Scotia—far from major population centers. It added to a
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