What if artificial intelligence could contribute to the fight against climate change? Some are convinced of this and want to make him the preferred contact for decision-makers.
It’s no secret that the large language models that power Google’s ChatGPT and Bard are very power and resource intensive. A characteristic that makes them rather incompatible with the climate objectives that many countries around the world have set for themselves.
However, in certain cases, this technology could well help us meet the challenges of tomorrow, and this is even the reason for a certain… ClimateGPT.
A solid database
A good language model doesn’t have to look like the projects developed by tech giants. While ChatGPT and Bard must meet very broad and very complete specifications, other AIs can specialize in very specific areas. This type of tool was developed by the Endowment for Climate Intelligence (ECI), an organization whose objective is to create artificial intelligence dedicated to the fight against climate change.
The result, ClimateGPT, specializes in resolving the climate crisis and aims to be the preferred contact for “ researchers, policy makers and business leaders ”, according to a press release from AppTek, one of the organizations behind the ECI. These individuals can, in fact, question the AI to help them make the best environmental decisions by acquiring “ a holistic understanding of the impacts of climate change across the natural, social and economic sciences “.
This AI tool was not trained with any data, since it ingested “ more than 10 billion web pages and millions of open access academic articles “. These were provided by Erasmus.IA, a platform specializing in the design of AI capable of supporting humanity in its future challenges. The ECI took the liberty of using a second series of climate data, but not only that, to refine its model. ClimateGPT should therefore be quite resilient in the face of misinformation, even though its creators warn that it “ may generate biased, offensive or inaccurate responses “. Nobody is perfect…
When AI is green and open-source
To contribute to the fight against climate change, the ECI wanted to limit the environmental impact of ClimateGPT. Its first node was launched at COP 28, where it was powered by the gigantic Al Dhafra Solar PV solar PV plant in Abu Dhabi. The model, for its part, was trained on a network of 256 Nvidia H100s,“ the most energy efficient cloud GPUs », Comments the organization, all powered by the Puyallup hydroelectric plant in Washington State, United States. Finally, access to the tool is now ensured thanks to Microsoft’s cloud infrastructures, which tries to have a less significant carbon impact.
ClimateGPT is not reserved for politicians and CAC 40 bosses. Everyone can access it via Hugging Face AI, a French platform dedicated to open-source AI that we presented to you last summer. It is possible to check the training data of the ECI model, analyze its operation and prevent possible defects that would go against its primary mission. A real guarantee of confidence which, we hope, will make this AI truly useful and relevant for decision-makers.
Source : PR Newswire
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