However, Witherspoon acknowledges the challenges, including the carbon footprint of AI itself and the energy consumed by data centers. She also highlights the need for access to climate-critical data and collaboration with domain experts. Despite these challenges, Witherspoon remains optimistic about the potential of AI in addressing climate change, emphasizing its versatility and scalability.
Key takeaways:
- DeepMind, the Google-owned artificial intelligence lab, is using AI to tackle climate change in three ways: understanding climate change through better models for prediction and monitoring, optimizing current systems and infrastructure, and accelerating breakthrough science.
- AI can help improve energy efficiency, as demonstrated by DeepMind's work in data centers where they achieved a 30% energy saving.
- One of the roadblocks to using AI to fight climate change is access to data. There are significant gaps in climate-critical data across all sectors.
- Another challenge is the need for collaboration with domain experts. DeepMind emphasizes the importance of working with experts to understand the problems they are trying to solve and to ensure the solutions they build will be used.