This is the article version of the invited talk I gave at the BSC AI Factory of Barcelona, during a CARTO event. The title ‘Earth Intelligence’ sounds like science fiction or philosophy. It isn’t. This is not a wish list for future data or tech I wish we had. We do in fact have enough data and tools. This is about the simplest, fastest way to access planetary insights right now. What a time to be working on this! ...
I was recently invited to come to the European Commission conference on Clean Air, about the role of AI. Most people would expect the usual story: AI will make things faster , models better , and cheaper. All of that is true, but that’s not the point. The most important aspect of AI here, and in many other domains, is to make stuff invisible. Stuff that just works, reliably, so we can build on it, depend on it, and focus on outcomes, not tools. To reduce the cognitive load, not increase it. ...
Dr. Fei-Fei Li’s new North Star targets the room… and misses the world. She is the godmother of AI — she changed history in 2006 when she realized that AI was rich in text and poor in images, so she created ImageNet, which gave eyes to AI. In her recent post, she argues that the next frontier is AI that understands space, 3D relations, and change over time. I agree. But the framing on spatial AI centers on rooms, robots, Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, the physical world… What about the world itself — Earth? The largest, most consequential “world model” we have, and need. Why is it missing from this north star? ...
Last week I was invited to speak at the Aarhus Symposium to technical and business students exploring the theme “Beyond the AI Hype: AI for Earth.” To make sense of this broad brief, I divided my class into three parts: a very candid view of what AI is (and isn’t) today in general, then AI applied to understanding Earth, and finally the impact of AI on Earth (its environmental footprint). My goal was simple: to cut through both hype and doom, showing where the technology genuinely shines, where it falls short, and why it matters for Earth. ...
Google just launched “Earth AI.” Kudos and thank you to Christopher Phillips, James Manyika, and the team. The world is a better place today. They’ve also raised public awareness and set a higher bar for what planetary-scale awareness could and should be, and how AI can help get us there. Many have asked me for hot takes, since I’m also deep in geoAI. IMO Google also leaked that their geo moat is getting weaker. Their tech paper makes clear this is more about smart orchestration of (open) models than throwing compute at closed data. Earth data — “the other trillion tokens of AI” — is not incremental to text/images but orthogonal. ...
My key message on Monday at the geo day at AWS in London was that a fundamental shift in how we approach Earth Observation (EO) data is not just possible, but essential, with Geo Embeddings at its core. Phil Cooper, the host, introduced the session around the question of whether GIS has an identity crisis. I think that is not only true, but also that is because GIS has had an EO product problem for decades and finally AI seems to provide the stack to solve it… We must change GIS EO from pixel math and widgets, to frictionless semantic navigation through embeddings. ...
We foolishly think AI for Earth is yet another try to deliver the same vision geospatial has promised for decades. The reality is much harsher. This was the provocative prompt I wanted to articulate on my plenary at SatSummit Lisbon. That room, and the network I can reach here, has some of the main shapers and doers of AI for Earth, both those that fully engage and build it, and also those that refuse to and by omission let others build without the experience and perspective they have. I strongly believe this window of opportunity to shape AI for Earth is closing in the next 12-24 months, so I will lean here with strong opinions loosely held. Do not aim to be comprehensive, but provocative, and encourage you to disagree, rebut, question and comment on this. The goal is the conversation to understand what’s happening, or not happening and should. ...
From a keynote at the European Rover Challenge last week in Krakow, and celebrating the 150th anniversary of “The Lunar Trilogy” by Jerzy Zulawski. Video at the end. The conference hall was buzzing. Outside, teams of students around the world were competing with their DIY robots on a Mars landscape, driven by the same age-old question that has fueled explorers for centuries: “What is where?” ...
The end of the pixel king Fig 1. A screenshot of Google Maps with a search for “grass” returns with “No results” even when it’s obvious to find the grass on the satellite image. Google Maps excels at providing detailed information on restaurants, live updates on public transport, and more. Yet, it struggles to identify something as simple as grass or an entire forest, which appears as a gray blob: ...
Last week I taught on a PhD-level summer course on geoAI, or AI for Earth, at the University of Copenhagen. I saw other speakers give their fantastic technical talks, some on fundamentals, and some on real specific applications. The organizers did a fantastic job to equip these selected and global group of PhD students with truly the latest and best in the field; depth and breadth. So after listening to other speakers, I decided to scrap my prepared presentation. I had tweaked the one I usually do about Clay with more technical parts. I was going to present our Clay v1, the choices, the architecture, the training, the results. Instead I chose to talk straight to the most important point. The “so what”. ...