🔮 Best of the month – August 2024

How AI, climate change & energy intertwine. Plus industry & economic trends to know

Sep 03, 2024

Hi,

Welcome to our August recap on AI, climate and energy transition, industry and economic trends. This summarises the most critical ideas and developments we wrote about in 18,000+ words during August.

Enjoy and let us know in the comments if we should keep this going on a regular basis!

Artificial intelligence

Eric Schmidt’s prophecy: The next two years will shock you [Commentary]
Bosses miss imagination when it comes to AI implementation – this may cost them their business [Commentary]
AI scaling continues to push limits, with projections suggesting training compute could reach 2e29 FLOP by 2030, requiring $250 billion in hardware. For comparison, that’s over five times Microsoft’s current annual Capex [EV#488]
The Gartner hype cycle suggests generative AI is at its peak, but we disagree with this view. Gartner estimates that 30% of projects are abandoned after the proof-of-concept stage. We see this as a fairly positive metric — a 30% project abandonment rate after proof of concept is considered reasonable compared to other tech projects [EV#485]
When AI agents can do a task, they do so at 3% of the cost of a human baseline [EV#486]
AI is enabling small businesses to perform graduate-level analysis at low cost, potentially accelerating innovation and efficiency gains [EV#488]
New research shows GPT-4 can forecast experimental outcomes with remarkable accuracy (r = 0.85), even for unpublished studies (r = 0.90) [EV#487]
American investors have provided $54 billion in funding for generative AI since 2019, 18 times more than China and the UK, which are tied for second place at $3 billion each [EV#487]
AI is creating new frontiers for us in real time. An AI diffusion model can now simulate the first-person shooter game Doom without pre-programmed game mechanics [EV#489]

…

Climate change and the energy transition

What is AI’s real climate impact? [Op-ed with Carl Frey]
The rooftop energy revolution that presages our future energy system (but you likely haven’t heard about it) [Commentary]
Renewable energy adoption is accelerating:
- Solar-plus-storage now undercuts fossil fuels in Germany [EV#486]
- California achieved 100 days of 100% renewable energy [EV#485]
- Texas plans to build 35 GW of solar, wind, and battery capacity in the next 18 months [EV#485]
- Long-distance renewable energy transmission is becoming viable, as evidenced by Sun Cable’s proposal to import solar energy from Australia to Singapore [EV#488]
- Battery prices have fallen by more than half in just 18 months [EV#489]
Experts argue engineers, not scientists, need to work harder on reducing emissions. [EV#485] At the same time, we now have evidence that governance matters A LOT [EV#488]
Direct Air Capture could reach gigaton scale by 2050 — we can learn lessons from scaling ammonia synthesis [EV#489]

…

Economic and industrial trends

GLP-1 agonists are the most important technology in the West today [Commentary]
China’s overproduction in strategic industries like EVs and solar could accelerate global adoption of green technologies [EV#487]
A quintessential company of the Exponential Age, SpaceX is coming to the rescue of two American astronauts stranded in space by Boeing’s space jalopy, the Starliner. This event is a test of evolutionary fitness in the Exponential Age [EV#489]
Over 200,000 people paid for a driverless ride with Waymo in San Francisco in May 2024 [EV#485]. I now believe that autonomous driving is getting close to the tipping point of rapid adoption [Commentary]
More than half of 16-24-year-olds in the UK watch no live broadcast TV during the week [EV#485]
Chinese car makers have defeated Western companies in their home market. The rest of the world beckons [EV#486]
Lab-grown chicken’s estimated cost is $6.2 per pound, approaching $4.1 per pound for conventional chicken [EV#489]
Google’s ad technology could see or access 84% of the global web display ad market (excluding China) as of late 2017 [EV#489]