- Once we started having these devastating fires, we needed more intel.

The need for intelligence is just overwhelming in today's fire service.

- [Narrator] Over the past 20 years, California has installed a network of more than a thousand remotely operated pan tilt zoom surveillance cameras on mountaintops.

- [Dispatcher] Vegetation fire, Highway 29 at Dutton Road.

- [Narrator] All those cameras generate petabytes of video.

Cal Fire partnered with scientists at UC San Diego to train a neural network to spot the early signs of trouble.

It's called Alert California.

- So here's one that just popped up.

Here's an anomaly.

- [Narrator] Cal Fire's Staff Chief of Fire and Intelligence, Philip SeLegue, showed me how it works while it was in action, detecting nascent fires, micro fires.

- That looks like just a little hint of some type of smoke that was-- - Based on this, dispatchers can orchestrate a fast response.

- AI has given this the ability to detect and to see where those fires are starting.

- Transport 1447 responding via MDC.

- [Narrator] For all they know, they have nipped some mega fires in the bud.

- The success are the fires that you don't hear about in the news.

- [Narrator] Artificial intelligence can't put out wildfires just yet.

Human firefighters still need to do that job.