Ai2 releases OlmoEarth v1.3 satellite embedding model with open weights and precomputed global 10m embeddings plus a browser-based Explorer

Ai2 released OlmoEarth v1.3 Base, with weights, pretraining data and code under its own OlmoEarth Artifact License. It also published precomputed annual global embeddings at 10m resolution (128 and 64 dimensions, hosted on Source Cooperative, roughly 150 TB per year). Coverage is global for 2023 to 2025 and select countries for 2017 to 2022. Alongside these came a no-sign-in browser Explorer, a technical report and a new tropical crop-type benchmark called PLANTEUR. Ai2 says its 128-dim embeddings lead on 20 of 27 evaluations against AlphaEarth Foundations and Tessera v2, and that v1.3 used 53% of the compute of v1.2.

Researchers, NGOs and small developers who map crops, land cover or illegal mining can now use ready-made global embeddings without training or running a large model themselves. That lowers the cost of entry and gives an open option next to Google's AlphaEarth. The practical limits are data size (150 TB per year is heavy to download or store) and the licence, which is custom rather than a standard open-source one, so commercial users should read it. Whether the quality holds on real, local tasks is not yet shown.

"State-of-the-art" rests on Ai2's own benchmark selection, and the compute savings are also self-reported. A win on 20 of 27 evaluations also means it lost or tied on 7, and the 64-dim version leads on only 18. "Fully open" is a stretch for a bespoke licence, and no independent comparison yet shows how large the gaps are or whether they matter in practice.

1. 01Independent benchmarks or replications comparing OlmoEarth, AlphaEarth and Tessera v2 on tasks and regions outside Ai2's own evaluation suite, especially PLANTEUR.
2. 02Real adoption signals: Hugging Face and Source Cooperative download counts, Explorer usage, and named conservation, agriculture or government projects using the embeddings within the next few months.
3. 03Scrutiny of the OlmoEarth Artifact License terms for commercial use, plus Ai2's plans to extend 2017 to 2022 coverage beyond select countries and any response from Google on AlphaEarth access.