VentureBeat: U.S. space agency NASA isn’t just concerned about exploring outer space, it’s also concerned about helping humanity to learn more about the planet Earth and the impacts of climate change. Today, NASA and IBM announced a partnership that will see the development of new artificial intelligence (AI) foundation models to help analyze geospatial satellite data, in a bid to help better understand and take action on climate change. To date, NASA has largely relied on the development of its own set of bespoke AI models to serve specific use cases. The promise of the foundation model approach is a large language model (LLM) that has been trained on lots of data that can serve as a more general purpose system that can be customized as needed. Among the initial goals of the partnership is to train a foundation model on NASA’s Harmonized Landsat Sentinel-2 (HLS) dataset, which has petabytes of data collected from space about land use changes on Earth. Beyond just helping to improve the state of climate analysis on Earth, IBM is hopeful that the new foundation model that it develops jointly with NASA will have broader applicability and a positive impact for enterprise use cases of AI as well.”