IBM and NASA Open Source Largest Geospatial AI Foundation Model on Hugging Face
I wish the press release had a bit more detail about what this model actually does and whether it's actually useful for the suggested use cases.<p>However, make no mistake: this is for the scientific community and will not help geospatial data to be commercialized. No one cares about your geospatial crop model or that you can identify energy infrastructure or that there's some activity around that copper mine.  Well, at least no one cares that will actually <i>pay</i> you.<p>(FWIW, I cofounded a geospatial analytics company)<p>Satellite data is extremely idiosyncratic.  It's coarse (~10m at best), infrequent (every few days at best), and oh you have to deal with the fact that the planet is covered in 50% clouds at any moment.  Satellite data works best on things that don't move, that are fairly large, and change infrequently.  If you find a use case that satisfies those conditions and want to make money, then you need to find a problem that terrestrial sensors haven't solved.  And if you find that problem, the cost of building, training, and running your model (plus the cost of the data!) has to be less than the marginal value of your model.  Good luck finding those use cases.<p>The US Government is special.  We don't know what's going on in North Korea or Ukraine or the South China Sea so we buy high resolution imagery over those areas (30cm) at great cost.  Large ag companies and oil companies know what's going on within their own facilities; and price gives them information about the rest of the supply chain.<p>In other words, this might be an interesting announcement for scientists, but it won't change the geospatial market at all.