Guest essay by Eric Worrall
A Google project to use artificial intelligence to improve the predictability of wind energy appears to have failed. Engineers who worked on the project have reportedly removed mention of their work from their linked profiles.
Climate change is on the agenda in the DeepMind AI laboratory after the energy heads have gone
PUBLISHED THU, DECEMBER 17, 2020 3:55 AM EST
Sam Shead @ SAM_L_SHEAD
IMPORTANT POINTS
- The DeepMind Energy unitthat has drawn a fair amount of attention over the years, has disappeared and none of the company’s employees mention it on their LinkedIn profiles.
- At one point, DeepMind wanted to use its AI technology to optimize National Grid, which owns and operates the infrastructure that powers homes and businesses across the UK.
- The organizations spent a lot of time working together, but there were many hurdles to overcome if anything was ever to be implemented.
LONDON – Artificial Intelligence (AI) Laboratory DeepMind has shifted its focus from climate change to other areas of science and pursues its original mission to create Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) which, in the opinion of several people familiar with the matter, is widely regarded as the holy grail of emerging technology.
…
One of DeepMind’s early, and perhaps most successful, projects was to cut Google’s huge electricity bill and immediately reduce the company’s carbon footprint. The search giant, technically a sister company of DeepMind as both are operated by Alphabet, announced in July 2016 that it had succeeded in reducing the energy consumption of its data center cooling devices, which are designed to protect Google’s servers from overheating 40 % with the help of a DeepMind AI system.
…
While the company’s achievements matter, it has yet to be publicly confirmed where and how the energy-efficient AI has been applied outside of Google’s data centers and wind farms.
National Grid Nightmare?
At one point DeepMind wanted to use its AI technology to optimize National Grid, which owns and operates the infrastructure that powers homes and businesses across the UK.
“We’re at the early stages of talking to National Grid and other major vendors about how we can investigate the kind of problems they’re having,” said Demis Hassabis, chief executive of DeepMind, in an interview with the Financial Times in March 2017. “It would be amazing if you could save 10% of the country’s energy consumption without new infrastructure, just by optimizing it. That’s pretty exciting.”
In March last year it emerged that the talks had collapsed between DeepMind and National Grid. The organizations spent much of their time working together, sometimes at a National Grid facility near Reading, Berkshire, England. However, there were many hurdles to overcome if anything was ever to be implemented.
…
Gary Marcus, CEO of robotics company Robust AI and co-author of Rebooting AI, which analyzes the industry and suggests suggestions for further development, told CNBC The technology may not have worked well enough for National Grid to justify the cost.
“Your primary technique, deep reinforcement learning, works best in well-controlled environments such as board games and can deal with the complexity and unpredictability of the real world,Marcus told CNBC.
Sheikh added, “The technology may not have worked because it wasn’t really that mature.”
…
Read more: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/17/climate-change-falls-down-the-agenda-at-ai-lab-deepmind.html
This isn’t the first time a high-profile Google renewable energy project has failed.
As early as 2016, Google Engineers announced that an engineering project had not found a feasible route to 100% renewable energy. Google’s 2016 engineers concluded that renewable energy “just doesn’t work”.
Like this:
Loading…
