Ironically typhoon forecasting, at this moment, is more valuable. These predictions are matters of life, death, and billions of dollars in damage.
It could save thousands of lives because people can be evacuated if you can predict a few hours or a day further ahead, or the path more accurately. You can save some damage by moving ships and vehicles.
But you can't evacuate buildings or infrastructure.
TFA says they might be able to predict one extra day ahead (three days instead of two). No prediction system will ever give you a week's notice on a typhoon.
Keep in mind, DeepMind has a very well documented history of releasing enormously hyped up PR pieces with grandiose claims that are never backed up in real world usage, or are simply lies.
The context is so important here and radically re-frames the impact of GDM's results. Folks need to understand that with modern forecasting tools, we anticipate tropical cyclones to develop 5-10 days before they ever threaten landfall. The "2-day" vs "3-day" improvement in forecast skill is better interpreted as a modest reduction in forecast uncertainty - the "cone" on the hurricane track map gets a little narrower.
It's not like there's a "literal extra day" of preparation time for folks who may be impacted by the storm. They get the same amount of time they always have. Nothing actually changes on-the-ground for really any consumer of hurricane forecast data anywhere in the world.
And that's not a sleight against GDM. It's just a simple statement of how good contemporary weather forecasting is, and how good it was before AI forecast models came onto the scene some 5 years ago.
I can think of 10 examples how one could make money with fable. With WeatherNext? Only 10 examples of preventing costs.
Taking this, maybe naive, thought further, profits have no upper limit (except resources) while costs can only save so much?