🔮 Exponential retrospective — August 2023 in 6 charts

Learning rates, LLMs & politics, the Huang effect ++

Hi,

August has flown by, so we decided to do a quick retrospective of key areas we were researching and thinking over the course of the month — in 6 charts.

Let’s go!

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Heat records

We stepped into August on the heels of the hottest month on record globally. Every day of July starting on July 3rd broke the modern-day record high of 16.924°C (62.46°F), which was set on July 24, 2022. We looked at the effects of heat on cities and economies in our Chartpack on Aug 2.

Note: The '2m' measurement refers to the air temperature at 2 meters above the Earth’s surface. Source: ClimateReanalyzer

In his guest essay for Exponential View, Bloomberg Green senior reporter Akshat Rathi struck a note of pragmatic optimism. Akshat shared one case study he researched for his book Climate Capitalism of Danish Orsted which transitioned from an oil and gas company to a renewable leader thanks to government action and market dynamics. Read Akshat’s case study here.

While we’re at it: renewable energy performance continues to amaze. In the last week of August, we spotted that the learning rates of solar PV are the best we’ve ever seen. In 2000 it took a year to add 1GW of solar PV globally; today it takes less than a day!

via Hannah Ritchie

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LLMs political leanings

A pre-print we reviewed on August 13 revealed that LLMs have political biases: GPT-4 leans towards libertarianism, while LLaMA is more authoritarian.¹ To unearth these biases, researchers posed questions about social and economic ideologies. The results highlighted pronounced biases in models, particularly regarding social issues.