It's worth pointing out that "state of the weather" is a little bit hand-wavy. The GraphCast model requires a fully-assimilated 3D atmospheric state - which means you still need to run a full-complexity numerical weather prediction system with a massive amount of inputs to actually get to the starting line for using this forecast tool.
Initializing directly from, say, geostationary and LEO satellite data with complementary surface station observations - skipping the assimilation step entirely - is clearly where this revolution is headed, but it's very important to explicitly note that we're not there yet (even in a research capacity).
Yeah current models aren’t quite ready to ingest real time noisy data like the actual weather… I hear they go off the rails if preprocessing is skipped (outliers, etc)
Initializing directly from, say, geostationary and LEO satellite data with complementary surface station observations - skipping the assimilation step entirely - is clearly where this revolution is headed, but it's very important to explicitly note that we're not there yet (even in a research capacity).