Everyone Wants to Make the Earth Searchable. But AI Still Can't See It.

There's a race underway right now to do for the Earth what Google once did for the web: make it searchable. You type a question and get back an answer grounded in satellite imagery. The building blocks are everywhere, from Google's planet-scale embeddings to IBM and NASA's Prithvi, NVIDIA's Earth-scale models, and open foundation models like Clay and TerraMind multiplying by the month. The pitch is seductive: compress the planet into vectors, and anyone, an analyst, an app, an agent, can query the world in seconds.

I truly believe in where this is heading. But there's a problem the demos tend to skip over, and it isn't a small one. For all the talk of seeing the planet, AI doesn't actually see the Earth at all; it pattern-matches pixels, and we now have hard evidence of just how far that gap goes.

Read the full article on Substack: https://omnigeo.substack.com/p/everyone-wants-to-make-the-earth