ChangeNOW: an LLM, a blockchain and many perlite bricks
🌱 Trip report from ChangeNOW 2024 at the Grand Palais Éphémère
ChangeNOW is a trade show for sustainability tech. Created in Paris in 2017, every year it brings together entrepreneurs, investors and policymakers; all interested in making our continued existence on this beautiful planet more tenable 🌱.
Here’s a trip report from my visit on Wednesday 💫.
Not so many LLMs
Ekimetrics, a French data science company, presented their climate Q&A bot. In an act of human-to-algorithm cruelty :), they made GPT read all of the IPCC climate reports. The resulting chatbot stands ready to answer climate-related questions like What can individuals do to address climate change?
The answers reference specific parts of the climate report and some of the 250 million research papers the tool indexes. This is a RAG system, not just a thin wrapper over GPT! (RAG, Retrieval-Augmented Generation, describes a system that first retrieves relevant snippets from previously indexed documents, and then passes them to an LLM for summarization.)
The question I tried: Is individual action actually useful to fight climate change, or is it a distraction we use to procrastinate on necessary but painful policy changes?
The response doesn’t give in to my provocative tone 💫 and seems reasonable :
While individual actions like reducing personal carbon footprint are important, they must be complemented by systemic changes facilitated by effective governance and policies.
I didn’t find any other pitches featuring LLMs. What did I find instead?
Blockchain!
Inuk presented their technology for bookkeeping carbon offsets. They store the tokens representing carbon offsets on the blockchain, which ensures that each token is only sold once. It also makes the entire system publicly traceable and auditable.
Of course, the system is only as good as all of the work that happens before the blockchain: in validating the carbon capture projects and issuing the carbon footprint tokens.
This upstream work seems more interesting and crucial to get right than the final bookkeeping of the offsets. (Could it be done without a blockchain, in a database with regularly published transparency reports?)
Perlite blocks
My personal favorite was System3E: a Polish company making lego-like, jointless construction bricks out of perlite, a type of volcanic rock.
The pitch is compelling: a wall made of their blocks takes 2x less CO2 emissions to make and has competitive parameters. Buildings can be assembled without mortar, glue or water. Perlite offers better thermal isolation than traditional materials, reducing the need for insulation.
Darek, the founder of System3E presented and explained their technology with warmth and enthusiasm that you don’t expect to find at a trade show at the end of a long day.
We should all aspire to find a project about which we can talk with love and passion at the end of a long conference day. That’s my real takeaway from ChangeNOW 💫.
More on this
🏟️ Venue: The last few years ChangeNOW has been taking place in the Grand Palais Éphémère. The temporary venue replaces the actual Grand Palais while it’s being renovated for the upcoming Olympic Games.
🗼 The Eiffel tower was supposed to be temporary too, when they put it up in 1889, so curious to see if it the Grand Palais Éphémère actually gets torn down after the games. This part of Paris seems to launch buildings the same way software companies launch products: everything is a test run and if people don’t like it we will tear it down.
🎧 On the philosophy of sustainability (and the metacrisis around it): We can purify the oceans, we can save the rainforest; but if the only reason we did that was to save our economy, we would have lost the main reason: because these things are powerful, beautiful, rich, complex entities that have their value in themselves. (Thank you
for the pointer !)
In other news
🍏 Apple gets sued by the US Justice Department. Ben Evans: These are mostly arguments from 15 years ago, and the centre of gravity has moved on. None of this case, nor the DMA, affects whether we will all use ChatGPT or RabbitOS to run our lives through an intelligent agent rather than swiping through smartphone apps. The future is elsewhere.
💿 Common corpus: the largest public domain dataset for training LLMs. Even “open” models like Llama and Mistral are trained on closed datasets. This type of corpus enables researchers to build fully open (openly trained) models.
📝 Among the A.I. Doomsayers: The doomers and the boomers are consumed by intramural fights, but from a distance they can look like two offshoots of the same tribe: people who are convinced that A.I. is the only thing worth paying attention to.
Postcard from Paris
Another ChangeNOW in the books. Now heading to Poland for the Easter weekend. (I can see chocolate bunnies in my near future 🐇.)
Have a great week 💫,
– Przemek
I love the Perlite block idea - amazing mission on tackling affordable housing segment. I did not realise how environmentally impactful manufacturing of construction materials was. With this 'easier' assembly, I can already see a new segment exploding - people who would be interested in building their own small home.... myself included when husband and I bought a piece of land in a small beach town in Thailand a couple of years ago. So have binged so many small home build videos over the years!
Reminded me of this hilarious flat-pack home from Amazon (not sure how real this is though!) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9YUu7xEl2I - but funny nonetheless.
Also, thank you for the shout out. I've been looking at the economy like a 'machine' on constant drive to grow - a lot of people benefit from it growing. But we've also realised that it can be manipulated - just from information asymmetry. But tech has also helped close this gap tremendously through things like - trading app accessibility, fractional trading, real-time financial information, etc. This is an ongoing fight lending to help level the playing field for retail investors. I'm kinda seeing a brighter future here.... but then again, I am an optimist!