Google’s latest AI weather model gives you no excuse to forget your umbrella

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1:06That's framer.com slash fcdaily. Rules and restrictions may apply. This episode is brought to you by ODSC AI. If you're a practitioner working in applied AI and data science, you need to be at ODSC West 2026. You see, it's where thousands of data scientists, ML engineers, AI researchers, and technical leaders are coming together for hands-on training. Now, this is a unique, incredible opportunity to participate in workshops and boot camps taught by experts from companies like Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Hugging Face, and other top companies and universities. It's a way for you to stay ahead of the field, learn from the best, and connect with the community.

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2:25That's odsc.ai slash west and use code tcdaily to get an extra 15 % off the number one AI builders and training conference. Google's latest AI weather model gives you no excuse to forget your umbrella. I'm Imran Shaikh and your daily crunch for Friday is raining down on you featuring three big tech headlines starting right now. After weeks of swirling rumors, NVIDIA confirmed that it has acquired Hugging Face for$12.93 billion. Yeah, Hugging Face's platform hosts 3 million models, 1 million applications used by over 18 million developers, and half a million datasets. In a blog post, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Wong said that Hugging Face will continue to support open source and open-weight models and will work on expanding developer access.

3:15Huang touted NVIDIA's contribution and said that the chip company has released more than 500 models and 250 open datasets on Hugging Face. He argued that the company builds upon models to get developers across the world to use them. For a company like NVIDIA, which is a dominant hardware platform for AI development and inference, an open ecosystem that it controls is, well, beneficial, as it can create a platform suited for its chips. Plus, as TechCrunch wrote earlier, NVIDIA will be able to sell its unused capacity to enterprise customers packaged with Hogging Faces offering. Zoox ain't wasting any time now that it's allowed to operate and charge for rides in its custom-built RoboTaxi.

3:58You see, the company has extended its commercial RoboTaxi service in Las Vegas to include rides to and from Harry Reid International Airport. Customers will be able to hail rides to the airport beginning Thursday, according to Zoox. The expansion, which unlocks a critical ride-hailing destination, builds on a series of recent wins for the Amazon-owned autonomous vehicle technology company. You see, Silicon Valley-based Zoox spent more than a decade developing its self-driving system and custom robo-taxi that lacks traditional controls like a steering wheel and pedals. Now, while it's made progress, even providing rides to customers in Las Vegas for a year, it wasn't able to operate as a true commercial robo-taxi service.

4:39Well, that changed in August after federal safety regulators gave Zoox a temporary exemption from certain motor vehicle safety standards. Scientists at Google DeepMind and Google Research released a new artificial intelligence model for weather forecasting today that sees our changing atmosphere more clearly and predicts its behavior more often. Weather Next 3 is the latest wave of a sea change in meteorology brought out by deep learning techniques, and Google says it'll start feeding into weather information, user-see-and-search, Google Maps, and Gemini, as well as being available to users and researchers on Google's cloud platforms.

5:19The new model's already proven to be most accurate among leading contenders tested on Operational WeatherBench, which is a utility for comparing AI forecasts built by the startup BrightBand. It looks at metrics like temperature, wind speed, and humidity, as well as beating out other deep learning models built by Google, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting. It also beats traditional forecasts from the U.S. National Weather Service and the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting. And folks, that's your Daily Crunch. Today's stories were reported by Tim Ferenholz, Ivan Mehta, and more awesome TechCrunch journalists.

5:57We'll see you here tomorrow. Same tech time, same crunch channel. And until then, find us at techcrunch.com.

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