Priya Donti, co-founder of Climate Change AI, speaks on a live panel discussing why climate tech and AI interest expanded rapidly.
Opinion
Donti: Conditioned on AI or not, 'P-Doom' is high for power grids
“Conditioned or not conditioned on AI, P-Doom is high for the grid, right? We are dealing with climate change and extreme events. We are dealing with a lack of, you know, planning for these things as we saw in Texas, for example. So I don't know that AI increas…”
Opinion
Donti: Generative AI Hype Risks Triggering Another AI Winter
“And with technologies like generative AI, there's a lot of, you know, flashiness and sort of jumping on the hype train, but I do sincerely worry that this will lead to an AI winter if a lot of those, you know, if we see a lot of, you know, hype and unscrupulou…”
Insight
Donti: Average-Case ML Fails on Grids Without Physical Boundary Guardrails
“The fact that you can get a machine learning algorithm that learns to do something nuanced from data and does it right most of the time doesn't help you in those times when it does something wrong that one time that really blacks out your grid. So this is wher…”
Insight
Donti: GenAI works when generation is hard but verification is easy
“As maybe thinking back to this barometer to evaluate whether an application kind of makes sense, I think a lot of these make sense because they satisfy this key property, which is something that is hard to do, but easy to verify. So ChatGPT and other generativ…”
Assertion Supported
Donti: Utilities lack regulated rate of return incentives for software innovation
“Utilities and system operators can receive a regulated rate of return, some percentage of the money back on kind of investments in things like, you know, wires in the ground, but we don't currently see that for software innovation, and we don't currently see t…”
Assertion Supported
Donti: Open Climate Fix cut National Grid forecasting error by 33-50%
“For example, the non-profit Open Climate Fix, they used AI and machine learning in combination, you know, with satellite imagery, historical data, to cut the error of the forecast that National Grid, the UK power system operator, is creating by a third to a ha…”