NASA and IBM have unveiled Surya, a new AI foundation model trained on nine years of solar observations, capable of predicting solar flares and space weather events with remarkable accuracy.
Surya analyzed millions of images from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory satellite, learning to forecast solar flares and eruptions, outperforming existing prediction methods by 16%. The system tracks everything – from the emergence of new sunspots to the velocity of solar wind – helping protect satellites, power grids, and astronauts from dangerous radiation storms.
One of the key innovations is its ability to process multiple wavelengths simultaneously, allowing the model to detect subtle changes on the Sun’s surface that human analysts often overlook.
The model is open to researchers – NASA has released an open-source version of Surya on HuggingFace, enabling the global scientific community to apply its solar-pattern recognition capabilities in their own projects.
Solar storms can cause massive damage to technological systems worldwide, from satellites and navigation networks to electrical distribution. At a time when commercial space traffic is surging and infrastructure is increasingly vulnerable, an AI tool like this could save billions of dollars in equipment and lost services – while also deepening our understanding of the Sun.
In Brief: Tech World Highlights
- Databricks announced expectations of a 61% valuation increase, surpassing $100 billion in its latest funding round, underscoring investor appetite for AI startups.
- ByteDance Seed introduced M3-Agent, a multimodal agent with long-term memory that processes visual and audio inputs in real time to update its world model.
- Karandeep Anand, CEO of Character AI, stated that the average user spends 80 minutes per day chatting with bots, predicting that most people will have “AI friends” in the future.
- xAI’s Grok website revealed system-level prompts for its AI personas, ranging from “homework helper” to “crazy conspiracy theorist,” with some containing explicit instructions.
- Nvidia released Nemotron Nano 2, small reasoning models with 9B–12B parameters, delivering strong performance compared to peers at six times the speed.
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