Paul Allen’s AI nonprofit unveils satellite data platform

Ai2 wants OlmoEarth to help nonprofits and governments without the resources for state-of-the-art geospatial AI work. 

A new open AI platform from the nonprofit created by the late Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen aims to make satellite imagery and other data about the earth more available and useful.  

The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (Ai2) on Tuesday unveiled the OlmoEarth Platform, backed by a family of AI foundation models trained on roughly 10 terabytes of data derived from millions of observations of the planet, including satellite images, radar readings, and existing maps of features like forest cover.

The OlmoEarth models can then be fine-tuned for specific purposes, like detecting changes in vegetation, with the help of a companion software tool called OlmoEarth Studio. Details on model performance are included in a new scientific paper.