Machine Learning techniques are upending multiple scientific fields. Operational 5-day forecasting of air quality in 1 minute in this paper from Chinese researchers.

This is awesome work with very clear public health implications.

EDIT for clarity: I am.not suggesting LLMs have anything to do with this work, but many people hear AI and imagine LLMs. And many of them.are perhaps rightly sceptical of AI as a result.
But AI or ML techniques can be useful for lots of things, not just chatbots. And we should probably invest more in those.


https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10234-y

Advancing operational global aerosol forecasting with machine learning - Nature

Reliable 5-day, 3-hourly forecasts of aerosol optical components and surface concentrations are obtained in 1 minute using a machine-learning-driven forecasting system.

Nature
@Ruth_Mottram this article does not consider LLM, as far as I understand.

@precariousmind @Ruth_Mottram
👆🏻
And that is another problem!
LLMs and generative "AI" are so prevailant that other useful machine learning technics get completely overshadowed and often starved of resource.

So I would change the central declaration.

We need to get over the LLM (for everything) hype and get back to use and fund different machine learning ("AI") tools

@realn2s @Ruth_Mottram that is the point.
Besides many other negative points, LLM/genAI enables Silicon Valley evil companies to achieve evil purposes quicker. At the end of the day, they enhance personal data collection, surveillance, and (just seen with Anthropic) military use.
@precariousmind @realn2s This was exactly my point! And probably why we need to start regularly calling the chatbots LLMs rather than "AI"