Artificial intelligence has a crucial role to play in the pursuit of net-zero emissions, but it cannot do it by itself until new technologies to expand sources of energy come onstream to meet growing demand.
A senior manager at oil company Shell joined innovators and futurists at the CogX Festival in London in sketching out the effects of AI on the energy revolution.
“AI and digital have a really fundamental role to play in the energy transition,” said Amy Challen, general manager for artificial intelligence at Shell.
“AI is not the answer. The answer is physical and chemical technologies and a massive shift in the way we do things. But AI is a massive enabler.”
Caroline Cochran, the chief operating officer of Oklo, a company developing advanced fission nuclear power plants, agrees that AI can and will help on the road to net zero as strides are being made in other areas as well.
“There’s technologies that already exist, it’s just a question of deploying them,” Ms Cochran said.
Jack Hidary, chief executive of SandboxAQ, said AI technology was only a taste of the progress that quantum mechanics would bring.
Mr Hidary said the technology underlying the exploitation of large language models could be used for simulation of proteins, not just computer bits.
He gave two examples on the cusp of change: drug testing for new treatments; and battery technology to service individual homes.
“Every single molecule designed to be a drug will go through simulation in this computing revolution, which will speed up design, drop the costs and most importantly, increase the chances of success in a real clinical trial," Mr Hidary said.
"When we think about batteries – not just electric vehicles but buildings like your home, offices like your home – we need batteries in every single one of them to draw on the clean energy such as solar or wind, store it and use it 24 hours, turning solar, for example, from an intermittent source to a baseload energy source.
“Now with these tools of simulation and AI we can have this next revolution.
"We can understand different elements to create alternative battery technologies, aluminium-based batteries, zinc-based batteries and other chemistries."
CogX Festival in London - in pictures
Ms Challen said Shell was able to use AI far more today than just a few years ago.
“We’re much better than we were five years ago,” she told the CogX Festival.
“We’ve got over a hundred AI-powered applications in development and deployment.
"We’ve got over four trillion rows of sensor data in the data lake and this number goes up every month, and we’ve got over 17,000 pieces of equipment being monitored in our predicting maintenance programme.”
Technology could yet provide the means of harvesting solar power from space, according to Pablos Holman, a general partner in Deep Future and former executive at the Jeff Bezos-backed space venture Blue Origin.
“Solar panels in space will get eight times as much energy and you beam it down to Earth through radio waves,” Mr Holman said.
“In this decade, doing solar in space will become the lowest-cost baseload energy anywhere on earth.
“You don’t need storage, you don’t need transmission lines and its coming to you carbon-free.”
But that is not to say the development of AI that accelerates the process to net zero is without its challenges.
“Anyone can do proof of concept and get very excited about it, but it can be really hard to actually realise value," Ms Challen said.
“We need process changes. Unless you actually embed what you’re doing and change the way someone is doing a particular process, it’s not going to go anywhere.
“You need technology that scales – if you try and do it in a local development environment, you’re not going to go anywhere.”
“The landscape is getting more and more complex and with generative AI we see some risks being introduced with that, just because of people’s naivety about these tools and about what they can do.”
Nonetheless, Ms Challen said that Shell supports the concept of open-source software in AI.
“We actually have open sourced some of our own products," she said. "We’re also a strong believer in using open-source components in many of the models we build.”
The processing of enormous amounts of data for AI is a much more energy-intensive process than its predecessor and leading figures in the industry are now backing ventures to deliver that power.
Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, has emerged as a backer of nuclear fission as the chairman of Oklo as it seeks to build small nuclear reactors.
Ms Cochran, a co-founder of Oklo, told CogX its reactors are going to be much smaller and designed to reuse existing nuclear fuel.
“We can make small power plants that have inherent safety characteristics and you can even use nuclear waste as fuel," she said.
“You need a tonne of energy for AI. We talk to the data centres who are making huge commitments in terms of decarbonising.
"They are looking for energy supplies. They are being told by utilities in those areas you can’t build here unless you bring your own power.
"We have small power plants that can run 24/7, which is important.
"They need a clean energy source that can do that 24/7 and there’s really not much other than nuclear that can do it.”
2017%20RESULTS%3A%20FRENCH%20VOTERS%20IN%20UK
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The years Ramadan fell in May
The biog
Hometown: Cairo
Age: 37
Favourite TV series: The Handmaid’s Tale, Black Mirror
Favourite anime series: Death Note, One Piece and Hellsing
Favourite book: Designing Brand Identity, Fifth Edition
As it stands in Pool A
1. Japan - Played 3, Won 3, Points 14
2. Ireland - Played 3, Won 2, Lost 1, Points 11
3. Scotland - Played 2, Won 1, Lost 1, Points 5
Remaining fixtures
Scotland v Russia – Wednesday, 11.15am
Ireland v Samoa – Saturday, 2.45pm
Japan v Scotland – Sunday, 2.45pm
INDIA SQUAD
Rohit Sharma (captain), Shikhar Dhawan (vice-captain), KL Rahul, Suresh Raina, Manish Pandey, Dinesh Karthik (wicketkeeper), Deepak Hooda, Washington Sundar, Yuzvendra Chahal, Axar Patel, Vijay Shankar, Shardul Thakur, Jaydev Unadkat, Mohammad Siraj and Rishabh Pant (wicketkeeper)
AS IT STANDS IN POOL A
1. Japan - Played 3, Won 3, Points 14
2. Ireland - Played 3, Won 2, Lost 1, Points 11
3. Scotland - Played 2, Won 1, Lost 1, Points 5
Remaining fixtures
Scotland v Russia – Wednesday, 11.15am
Ireland v Samoa – Saturday, 2.45pm
Japan v Scotland – Sunday, 2.45pm
World Series
Game 1: Red Sox 8, Dodgers 4
Game 2: Red Sox 4, Dodgers 2
Game 3: Saturday (UAE)
* if needed
Game 4: Sunday
Game 5: Monday
Game 6: Wednesday
Game 7: Thursday
Living in...
This article is part of a guide on where to live in the UAE. Our reporters will profile some of the country’s most desirable districts, provide an estimate of rental prices and introduce you to some of the residents who call each area home.
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The Africa Institute 101
Housed on the same site as the original Africa Hall, which first hosted an Arab-African Symposium in 1976, the newly renovated building will be home to a think tank and postgraduate studies hub (it will offer master’s and PhD programmes). The centre will focus on both the historical and contemporary links between Africa and the Gulf, and will serve as a meeting place for conferences, symposia, lectures, film screenings, plays, musical performances and more. In fact, today it is hosting a symposium – 5-plus-1: Rethinking Abstraction that will look at the six decades of Frank Bowling’s career, as well as those of his contemporaries that invested social, cultural and personal meaning into abstraction.
FIXTURES
All times UAE ( 4 GMT)
Friday
Saint-Etienne v Montpellier (10.45pm)
Saturday
Monaco v Caen (7pm)
Amiens v Bordeaux (10pm)
Angers v Toulouse (10pm)
Metz v Dijon (10pm)
Nantes v Guingamp (10pm)
Rennes v Lille (10pm)
Sunday
Nice v Strasbourg (5pm)
Troyes v Lyon (7pm)
Marseille v Paris Saint-Germain (11pm)
2020 Oscars winners: in numbers
- Parasite – 4
- 1917– 3
- Ford v Ferrari – 2
- Joker – 2
- Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood – 2
- American Factory – 1
- Bombshell – 1
- Hair Love – 1
- Jojo Rabbit – 1
- Judy – 1
- Little Women – 1
- Learning to Skateboard in a Warzone (If You're a Girl) – 1
- Marriage Story – 1
- Rocketman – 1
- The Neighbors' Window – 1
- Toy Story 4 – 1
'HIJRAH%3A%20IN%20THE%20FOOTSTEPS%20OF%20THE%20PROPHET'
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Learn more about Qasr Al Hosn
In 2013, The National's History Project went beyond the walls to see what life was like living in Abu Dhabi's fabled fort:
Groom and Two Brides
Director: Elie Semaan
Starring: Abdullah Boushehri, Laila Abdallah, Lulwa Almulla
Rating: 3/5
Terror attacks in Paris, November 13, 2015
- At 9.16pm, three suicide attackers killed one person outside the Atade de France during a foootball match between France and Germany
- At 9.25pm, three attackers opened fire on restaurants and cafes over 20 minutes, killing 39 people
- Shortly after 9.40pm, three other attackers launched a three-hour raid on the Bataclan, in which 1,500 people had gathered to watch a rock concert. In total, 90 people were killed
- Salah Abdeslam, the only survivor of the terrorists, did not directly participate in the attacks, thought to be due to a technical glitch in his suicide vest
- He fled to Belgium and was involved in attacks on Brussels in March 2016. He is serving a life sentence in France
Islamophobia definition
A widely accepted definition was made by the All Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims in 2019: “Islamophobia is rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.” It further defines it as “inciting hatred or violence against Muslims”.
SPEC%20SHEET%3A%20SAMSUNG%20GALAXY%20S24%20ULTRA
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GIANT REVIEW
Starring: Amir El-Masry, Pierce Brosnan
Director: Athale
Rating: 4/5
White hydrogen: Naturally occurring hydrogen
Chromite: Hard, metallic mineral containing iron oxide and chromium oxide
Ultramafic rocks: Dark-coloured rocks rich in magnesium or iron with very low silica content
Ophiolite: A section of the earth’s crust, which is oceanic in nature that has since been uplifted and exposed on land
Olivine: A commonly occurring magnesium iron silicate mineral that derives its name for its olive-green yellow-green colour
MOUNTAINHEAD REVIEW
Starring: Ramy Youssef, Steve Carell, Jason Schwartzman
Director: Jesse Armstrong
Rating: 3.5/5
French business
France has organised a delegation of leading businesses to travel to Syria. The group was led by French shipping giant CMA CGM, which struck a 30-year contract in May with the Syrian government to develop and run Latakia port. Also present were water and waste management company Suez, defence multinational Thales, and Ellipse Group, which is currently looking into rehabilitating Syrian hospitals.
THE SIXTH SENSE
Starring: Bruce Willis, Toni Collette, Hayley Joel Osment
Director: M. Night Shyamalan
Rating: 5/5
