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An advertising company uses a bullshit machine to pretend to be a climate engineer, hilarity ensues.

“Meta’s AI climate tool raised false hope of CO2 removal, scientists say”
ft.com/content/69220fea-9c9a-4… ping @davidgerard

Maybe for our next trick we can ask a car manufacturing company how to grow tulips. It’d make the same amount of sense as asking Meta how to remove atmospheric CO2.

Meta has been accused of using faulty data to train an artificial intelligence climate tool, with scientists claiming the Big Tech group raised false hopes about the feasibility of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at scale. The tech company said last year that it had helped researchers with the elusive problem of identifying materials to efficiently remove carbon dioxide from air, by publishing a "groundbreaking" data set on which it also trained free-to-use machine learning models. But none of the 135 materials that Meta's research said could bind COz "strongly" had that characteristic, while some did not exist, according to researchers from Heriot Watt University and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL). "I wish they had computed a bit less and thought a bit more," said Berend Smit, a professor of chemical engineering at EPFL, describing some of Meta's results as "nonsense". "You get the impression that the Big Tech mentality is do first, think later." Meta said in response that its data set was based on "valid calculations useful for training machine learning models". It added that it had "long believed in open sourcing technology ... because that approach promotes collaboration and innovation" Tech companies have invested in bringing down the cost of COz removal techniques - such as direct air capture (DAC) - as they prepare to offset their own carbon footprints, which have grown as they race to build generative AI tools.

Client Challenge

www.ft.com
@David Gerard
This entry was edited (5 months ago)
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