Ai2 Releases OlmoEarth v1.3: Open-Source Satellite Embedding Model and Global Precomputed Data Enable Geospatial Analysis Without GPUs
Ai2 launches OlmoEarth v1.3, offering globally precomputed satellite embeddings and a browser-based explorer, allowing users to perform land-cover and change detection analysis with lightweight classifiers without needing GPUs or fine-tuning.
The Allen Institute for AI (Ai2), a US-based non-profit research organization, released OlmoEarth v1.3 on October 22, 2026, claiming it is a state-of-the-art open-source satellite embedding model. The release includes not only the model weights but also, for the first time, annually precomputed embeddings covering the entire planet (10-meter resolution, 64-dim and 128-dim), along with a browser-based interactive map tool called the "OlmoEarth Embeddings Explorer."
Previously, using OlmoEarth primarily relied on fine-tuning in OlmoEarth Studio, which required GPU access and the ability to download and store vast amounts of satellite imagery. The newly released precomputed embeddings compress satellite data into reusable feature vectors, turning tasks like creating crop maps, land-cover maps, or change analyses into lightweight modeling problems: users can simply train small classifiers on top of the embeddings and run them locally, requiring no advanced technical knowledge or sign-in.
According to Ai2's official blog, OlmoEarth v1.3's 128-dimensional embeddings scored highest in 20 out of 27 evaluations across six continents, ranking overall ahead of AlphaEarth Foundations and Tessera v2. The model reads Sentinel-1 radar and Sentinel-2/Landsat multispectral satellite time series to generate one vector for every 10-meter pixel on Earth. Additionally, Ai2 introduced PLANTEUR, a new crop-type benchmark for tropical farming. All model weights, pretraining data, and code are fully open.