Ai2 opens OlmoEarth embeddings
On 22 October 2026 Ai2 released OlmoEarth v1.3, a satellite embedding model, with precomputed annual embeddings for the whole planet at 10-metre resolution (128 dimensions, plus a 64-dimension subset), a browser tool for exploring and classifying them, the technical report and a new crop-type benchmark, PLANTEUR. Ai2 says the embeddings score highest on 20 of 27 evaluations against AlphaEarth Foundations and Tessera v2 and that the model weights, pretraining data and code are open.
Why it matters
The release turns a foundation model for satellite imagery into something that can be used without a GPU: the post says a 128-number vector per 10-metre pixel, from a year of radar and multispectral data, is already computed for 2025, 2024 and 2023 globally (2017 to 2022 for selected countries), and that a small classifier on those vectors is enough for crop, land-cover or change maps. Ai2 calls it the cheapest OlmoEarth model to train (53% of the compute of v1.2) and puts the cost of reproducing the final pre-training run at about $2,720 of H100 time. The claims about evaluation results are Ai2's own.
What the post says. The model reads a year of Sentinel-1 radar and Sentinel-2 and Landsat multispectral time series; a vision transformer, an attention pooler and a linear layer produce a 128-number vector per 10-metre pixel, and the first 64 dimensions also work alone. The OlmoEarth Embeddings Explorer lets a user pan, flip between years, find similar places, train a small classifier from a few labelled points and export a GeoTIFF, with no account. The archive is about 150 TB per year; coverage is 2023 to 2025 globally and 2017 to 2022 for selected countries; open provenance tables list the source scenes for every 20-kilometre tile and year. Evaluation: 27 evaluations across six continents; the 128-dimension embeddings score highest on 20 of 27, the 64-dimension version on 18 of 27; PLANTEUR is a crop-type benchmark for tropical farming. Licence: "the OlmoEarth Artifact License, the same open license as v1 and v1.2" (the repository's licence field reads "other"). The worked example is illegal gold mining in Madre de Dios, Peru. Dates. The post is dated 22 October 2026 on Ai2's site and on its Hugging Face mirror. The repository allenai/OlmoEarth-v1_3-Base was created on 4 September 2026 and last modified on 13 October, so the weights were on the platform before the announcement; the record is dated by the announcement, which came with the embeddings, the Explorer and the report. What the record does not claim. The comparison with AlphaEarth Foundations and Tessera v2 is Ai2's; no independent evaluation was read. "Fully open" is the post's phrase; the licence named is the OlmoEarth Artifact License, not a standard open-source licence, and its terms were not read. Whether the repository was public before 22 October is not known.