Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI (the company behind ChatGPT), has said on numerous occasions that the work OpenAI is doing will lead to some enormous new discoveries that could allow humans to solve climate change and cure cancer.
"OpenAI was founded on the belief that artificial intelligence has the potential to improve nearly every aspect of our lives," he said at a Senate oversight hearing in May.
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But there are a few issues with his bold dreams of solving climate change, one of which is that, according to AI expert Dr. Sasha Luccioni, the very size of models like ChatGPT (large language models, or LLMs) voids any climate-positive benefit that they could lead to.
ChatGPT and its peers suck up a ton of resources, emitting aggressively in the process.
"We could be doing great stuff for the climate with AI, which we are doing to some extent, but it's kind of being voided by these large language models and the amount of resources they need," Luccioni said in a June interview.
OpenAI has been very tight-lipped about the data that ChatGPT was trained on, making it virtually impossible for researchers to meaningfully study the model.
NASA and IBM, however, are making strides not only in that climate-positive direction, but also in the important area of open-sourced models and data.
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IBM said Thursday that its geospatial foundational model, built in collaboration with NASA, is now openly available on Hugging Face, a leader in open-source machine-learning AI.
The goal of this, IBM said, is to help the planet.
"The essential role of open-source technologies to accelerate critical areas of discovery such as climate change has never been clearer," Sriram Raghavan IBM's vice president of AI research said in a statement. Raghavan added that this partnership will allow all the scientific community to "leverage the power of collaboration to implement faster and more impactful solutions that will improve our planet."
One small step for @NASAEarth, one giant leap for open-source! 🚀 NASA and @IBM have fully open-sourced their geospatial foundation model on the Hub, democratizing access and enabling many use cases for AI climate and earth science. Check out the model in thread.👇 pic.twitter.com/IQtnD1dizu
— Brigitte (@BrigitteTousi) August 3, 2023
The model, which was trained over the course of a year across the U.S., can now be repurposed across a series of climate-related sectors, according to IBM. This includes tracking deforestation, predicting crop yields and monitoring greenhouse gas emissions.
"AI remains a science-driven field, and science can only progress through information sharing and collaboration," Jeff Boudier, head of product and growth at Hugging Face, said in a statement. "This is why open-source AI and the open release of models and datasets are so fundamental to the continued progress of AI, and making sure the technology will benefit as many people as possible."
