DeepSeek may have found a new way to improve AI's ability to remember An AI model released by Chinese AI company DeepSeek uses new techniques that could significantly improve AI's ability to "remember." The optical character recognition model works by extracting text from an image and turning it into machine-readable words. This is the same technology that powers scanner apps, translation of text in photos, and many accessibility tools. Researchers say the model's main innovation lies in how it processes information--specifically, how it stores and retrieves data. Improving how AI models "remember" could reduce how much computing power they need to run, thus mitigating AI's large (and growing) carbon footprint. The AI Hype Index: Data centers' neighbors are pivoting to power blackouts That's why we've created the AI Hype Index--a simple, at-a-glance summary of everything you need to know about the state of the industry.

Watch a subscriber-only conversation exploring how companies are pursuing climate solutions amid political shifts in the U.S. Companies are pursuing climate solutions amid shifting U.S. politics and economic uncertainty. Drawing from MIT Technology Review's 10 Climate Tech Companies to Watch list, this session highlights the most promising technologies--from electric trucks to gene-edited crops--and explores the challenges companies face in advancing climate progress today. It's surprisingly easy to stumble into a relationship with an AI chatbot Rhiannon Williams Therapists are secretly using ChatGPT. It's surprisingly easy to stumble into a relationship with an AI chatbot Therapists are secretly using ChatGPT. Some therapists are using AI during therapy sessions. Marcin Jakubowski is compiling a DIY set of society's essential machines and making it open-source.

The Download: what to make of OpenAI's Atlas browser, and how to make climate progress I tried OpenAI's new Atlas browser but I still don't know what it's for OpenAI rolled out a new web browser last week called Atlas. It comes with ChatGPT built in, along with an agent, so that you can browse, get answers, and have automated tasks performed on your behalf all at the same time. I've spent the past several days tinkering with Atlas. I've used it to do all my normal web browsing, and also tried to take advantage of the ChatGPT functions--plus I threw some weird agentic tasks its way to see how it did with those. My impression is that Atlas is fine? But my big takeaway is that it's pretty pointless for anyone not employed by OpenAI.

Climate change poses an urgent global threat, needing the rapid identification and deployment of innovative solutions. We hypothesise that many of these solutions already exist within scientific literature but remain underutilised. To address this gap, this study employs a curated dataset sourced from OpenAlex, a comprehensive repository of scientific papers. Utilising Large Language Models (LLMs), such as GPT4-o from OpenAI, we evaluate title-abstract pairs from scientific papers on seven dimensions, covering climate change mitigation potential, stage of technological development, and readiness for deployment. The outputs of the language models are then compared with human evaluations to assess their effectiveness in identifying promising yet overlooked climate innovations. Our findings suggest that these LLM-based models can effectively augment human expertise, uncovering climate solutions that are potentially impactful but with far greater speed, throughput and consistency. Here, we focused on UK-based solutions, but the workflow is region-agnostic. This work contributes to the discovery of neglected innovations in scientific literature and demonstrates the potential of AI in enhancing climate action strategies.

AI has been proposed as an important tool to support several efforts related to nature-based climate solutions such as the detection of wildfires that affect forests and vegetation-based offsets. While this and other use-cases provide important demonstrative value of the power of AI in climate change mitigation, such efforts have typically been undertaken in silos, without awareness of the integrative nature of real-world climate policy-making. In this paper, we propose a novel overarching framework for AI-aided integrated and comprehensive decision support for various aspects of nature-based climate decision-making. Focusing on vegetation-based solutions such as forests, we demonstrate how different AI-aided decision support models such as AI-aided wildfire detection, AI-aided vegetation carbon stock assessment, reversal risk mitigation, and disaster response planning can be integrated into a comprehensive framework. Rather than being disparate elements, we posit that the exchange of data and analytical results across elements of the framework, and careful mitigation of uncertainty propagation will provide tremendous value relative to the status-quo for real-world climate policy-making.

Tackling climate change is one of the greatest challenges facing humanity. Over the next decade, the technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) – particularly 5G, the Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) – will provide essential tools for increasing efficiency in the economy and preparing for a post-fossil fuel society. Last year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change delivered its special report on the effects of global warming of 1.5 C and above. The report clearly lays out the difference between 1.5 C and 2 C warming and emphasizes the urgent need to avoid crossing tipping points in Earth's life support systems. To give us a chance to limit global warming to this level, global greenhouse gas emissions must peak by 2020 and then fall by half every decade, corresponding to 7% annual reductions as a global average.

Tackling climate change is one of the greatest challenges facing humanity. Over the next decade, the technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) – particularly 5G, the Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) – will provide essential tools for increasing efficiency in the economy and preparing for a post-fossil fuel society. Last year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change delivered its special report on the effects of global warming of 1.5 C and above. The report clearly lays out the difference between 1.5 C and 2 C warming and emphasizes the urgent need to avoid crossing tipping points in Earth's life support systems. To give us a chance to limit global warming to this level, global greenhouse gas emissions must peak by 2020 and then fall by half every decade, corresponding to 7% annual reductions as a global average.