Smith42
80TB+ of astronomy for the HDD-poor: crossmatch the Universe from your laptop
Opencode
US halts student visa appointments and plans expanded social media vetting
Mistral Small 3 Announcement
The Multimodal Universe: Enabling Large-Scale ML with 100TB of Astro Data
Will we run out of data? Limits of LLM scaling based on human-generated data
Astronomy Generates Mountains of Data. That's Perfect for AI – Universe Today
This work presents AstroPT, an autoregressive pretrained transformer developed with astronomical use-cases in mind. The AstroPT models presented here have been pretrained on 8.6 million 512 × 512 pixel grz-band galaxy postage stamp observations from the DESI Legacy Survey DR8. We train a selection of foundation models of increasing size from 1 million to 2.1 billion parameters, and find that AstroPT follows a similar saturating log-log scaling law to textual models. We also find that the models' performances on downstream tasks as measured by linear probing improves with model size up to the model parameter saturation point. We believe that collaborative community development paves the best route towards realising an open source `Large Observation Model' -- a model trained on data taken from the observational sciences at the scale seen in natural language processing. To this end, we release the source code, weights, and dataset for AstroPT under the MIT license, and invite potential collaborators to join us in collectively building and researching these models.
AstroPT: Scaling Large Observation Models for Astronomy
EarthPT: A time series transformer foundation model
EarthPT is a 700 million parameter decoding transformer foundation model trained in an autoregressive self-supervised manner and developed specifically with EO use-cases in mind. EarthPT can accurately predict future satellite observations across the 400-2300 nm range well into the future (we found six months!).
The embeddings learnt by EarthPT hold semantically meaningful information and could be exploited for downstream tasks such as highly granular, dynamic land use classification.
The coolest takeaway for me is that EO data provides us with -- in theory -- quadrillions of training tokens. Therefore, if we assume that EarthPT follows neural scaling laws akin to those derived for Large Language Models (LLMs), there is currently no data-imposed limit to scaling EarthPT and other similar ‘Large Observation Models.’(!)