Ben Strong: We have Foundation Models of Earth, now What? Earth Index - MBM#69
Ben Strong is the Science & Machine Learning Lead at Earth Genome, an NGO working on the intersection of data, science & digital design. Most recently they've been working on Earth Index, an application built on top of Earth embeddings from foundation models. This conversation is the "so what" of Earth foundational model
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Book & Podcast recommendation
Demo Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (Affiliate Link)
Timestamps
(00:00) - Intro
(00:46) - Sponsor: OpenCage
(02:12) - Ben introduces himself
(03:28) - "DNA sequencing" for Earth
(13:37) - Not building another Foundation Model
(18:06) - Earth embeddings: So what?
(21:49) - What does locally finetuned mean?
(25:48) - Invite only for now: Why?
(29:31) - Journalistic applications
(31:59) - Yet another tool for finding images?
(35:09) - Deciding what to work on
(38:35) - Designing for simplicity
(44:14) - So, why hasn't Google made this?
(51:18) - Funding
(59:54) - Book & podcast Recommendations
