All posts tagged: Forecasts

National Weather Service Uses AI to Generate Forecasts, Accidentally Hallucinates Town With Dirty Joke Name

National Weather Service Uses AI to Generate Forecasts, Accidentally Hallucinates Town With Dirty Joke Name

Months before it mysteriously vaporized into thin air, Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency ravaged the National Weather Service, leading to severe staffing shortages. While the Trump administration promised to rehire most of the around 550 lost jobs at the agency last summer, effectively admitting that DOGE had gone too far, the agency’s offices across the country are still struggling with many roles that remain unfilled. And given the latest blunder, those who remain are seemingly struggling to keep up — relying on flawed AI tech to come up with broken visuals for social media feeds. As the Washington Post reports, the National Weather Service was caught posting an AI-generated weather map that hallucinated names for towns in Idaho. A graphic forecasts “gusty south winds tonight” and shows a map that lays out the names of nonexistent towns, like “Orangeotilld” and “Whata Bod” — an unintentionally hilarious hallucination that sounds more like an old timey dirty joke than an actual place where people live. The offending artwork was taken down on Monday, the same …

Jobs Shocker: Sept Payrolls Print Above All Forecasts, But Unemployment Rate Hits 4 Year High

Jobs Shocker: Sept Payrolls Print Above All Forecasts, But Unemployment Rate Hits 4 Year High

In our preview of today’s jobs report, we showed that the range of estimates is (extremely) broad, from 105K on the upper end, to just -20K on the lower. We also said that if today’s jobs number is atrocious, the Fed would once again be viewed as being behind the curve. So perhaps working in conjunction with the newly returned BLS employees, the outgoing Fed chair snuck in a pointer or two, and in an attempt to avert allegations of blowing up the economy, moments ago the BLS reported that the (delayed) September number came in a stronger than all estimates 119k jobs… … a 5 sigma beat to the median estimate… … which however followed yet another downward revision, as the total nonfarm payroll employment for July was revised down by 7,000, from +79,000 to +72,000, and the change for August was revised down by 26,000, from +22,000 to -4,000 (so much for Goldman’s thesis August would be replaced sharply higher). With these revisions, employment in July and August combined is 33,000 lower than previously reported, and …