Gemini & Physical World: Large Language Models Can Estimate the Intensity of Earthquake Shaking from Multi-Modal Social Media Posts

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This paper presents a novel approach to extract scientifically valuable information about Earth's physical phenomena from unconventional sources, such as multi-modal social media posts.

• Employing a state-of-the-art large language model (LLM), Gemini 1.5 Pro (Reid et al.
• 2024), we estimate earthquake ground shaking intensity from these unstructured posts.
• The model's output, in the form of Modified Mercalli Intensity (MMI) values, aligns well with independent observational data.