Earth AI: Unlocking Geospatial Insights with Foundation Models and Cross-Modal Reasoning
Aaron Bell / Amit Aides / Amr Helmy / Arbaaz Muslim / Aviad Barzilai / Aviv Slobodkin / Bolous Jaber / David Schottlander / George Leifman / Joydeep Paul / Mimi Sun / Nadav Sherman / Natalie Williams / Per Bjornsson / Roy Lee / Ruth Alcantara / Thomas Turnbull / Tomer Shekel / Vered Silverman / Yotam Gigi / Adam Boulanger / Alex Ottenwess / Ali Ahmadalipour / Anna Carter / Behzad Vahedi / Charles Elliott / David Andre / Elad Aharoni / Gia Jung / Hassler Thurston / Jacob Bien / Jamie McPike / Jessica Sapick / Juliet Rothenberg / Kartik Hegde / Kel Markert / Kim Philipp Jablonski / Luc Houriez / Monica Bharel / Phing VanLee / Reuven Sayag / Sebastian Pilarski / Shelley Cazares / Shlomi Pasternak / Siduo Jiang / Thomas Colthurst / Yang Chen / Yehonathan Refael / Yochai Blau / Yuval Carny / Yael Maguire / Avinatan Hassidim / James Manyika / Tim Thelin / Genady Beryozkin / Gautam Prasad / Luke Barrington / Yossi Matias / Niv Efron / Shravya Shetty
Geospatial data offers immense potential for understanding our planet. However, the sheer volume and diversity of this data along with its varied resolutions, timescales, and sparsity pose significant challenges for thorough analysis and interpretation. This paper introduces Earth AI, a family of geospatial AI models and agentic reasoning that enables significant advances in our ability to unlock novel and profound insights into our planet. This approach is built upon foundation models across three key domains--Planet-scale Imagery, Population, and Environment--and an intelligent Gemini-powered reasoning engine. We present rigorous benchmarks showcasing the power and novel capabilities of our foundation models and validate that when used together, they provide complementary value for geospatial inference and their synergies unlock superior predictive capabilities. To handle complex, multi-step queries, we developed a Gemini-powered agent that jointly reasons over our multiple foundation models along with large geospatial data sources and tools. On a new benchmark of real-world crisis scenarios, our agent demonstrates the ability to deliver critical and timely insights, effectively bridging the gap between raw geospatial data and actionable understanding.