Announcing ClimateGPT: The First Open Source Foundational AI Platform Dedicated to Addressing the Impact of Climate Change

● ClimateGPT is an ensemble of open source large language AI models designed to augment human decisions and address the complex and fast-moving impact of climate change.

● The platform is powered by Erasmus.AI and joined by AppTek and EQTY Lab to create a trusted AI solution available in over 20 languages that includes a groundbreaking 7-billion parameter foundational model with over 300 billion climate-specific tokens, trained and hosted entirely on renewable energy.

● Released on Hugging Face today, the open source model, research paper, and lineage explorer represent a new era in Responsible AI development alongside the launch of multiple pilots that advance expert fine-tuning and inclusion of various stakeholders from all over the world.

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Davos, Switzerland – 18 January, 2024: The Endowment for Climate Intelligence (ECI) is excited to announce the release of ClimateGPT, the first open source ensemble of AI models dedicated to addressing the fast-moving impact of climate change.  ClimateGPT seeks to drive resilient climate action for researchers, policymakers, and business leaders, to make informed decisions in this climate of uncertainty.  

Available on Hugging Face today, users can download the model, its research paper, and use a new AI lineage explorer to get visibility into its ClimateGPT training lifecycle. The breakthrough underscores the ECI’s commitment to the open science and open source AI communities, heralding a significant step toward responsible AI development.   The model benchmarks scores show a 10x the efficiency on climate-specific tasks and novel cascading machine translation that recovers nearly 94% of fluency performance compared to native multilingual language models. The result archives an equitable and audited AI model that is extensively fine-tuned by humans with diverse forms of expert and local stakeholder perspectives.

About the Model
After over four years of research, testing, building, and fine-tuning more than 100 Large Language Models, Erasmus.AI developed the corpus of ClimateGPT from its planetary scale corpora —one of the world's largest web and academic collections, with research and insights on climate, extreme weather, the Club of Rome’s Earth4All, and UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The Erasmus corpus is drawn from over 10  billion web pages and millions of open-access academic articles. ClimateGPT is trained to synthesize interdisciplinary research and break silos to form a holistic understanding of the impacts of climate change across the natural, social and economic sciences.

In collaboration with AppTek’s AI and language research scientists, the model was trained with a new climate-specific instruction fine-tuning (IFT) dataset and benchmark that allows users to access knowledge across scientific disciplines in over 20 languages. EQTY Lab worked closely with Further Ventures to architect the ClimateGPT platform to leverage a new advanced cryptographic framework that authenticates, secures, and governs responsible AI models.

AI Powered by the Sun
The ECI launched the initial node of ClimateGPT during COP28 at Abu Dhabi’s Al Dhafra Solar PV, a 2 gigawatt facility and the world’s largest single-site solar plant. Access to the model expanded today to Microsoft’s green energy data centers worldwide. The ECI trained ClimateGPT on an array of 256 Nvidia H100s, the most-energy efficient cloud GPUs, and powered by hydroelectric energy in Puyallup, Washington.  

Designed for Enterprise
Using a groundbreaking Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) AI platform, enterprises can harness the open source model and apply it to real-time and proprietary datasets. Integrations into Salesforce and Databricks provide rapid deployment and fine-tuning of the model. At the UN COP28 Conference, the first corporate entities announced their deployment of the platform, including TAQA, Etihad Rail and ADNEC Group. The renewable energy company Masdar is also among the first adopters of the model.

Responsible AI
To ensure proper transparency and governance, the ClimateGPT leverages a new, advanced, trusted AI solution from EQTY Lab that registers the entire AI lifecycle on the Hedera enterprise-grade blockchain and preserves the model data on Protocol Lab’s IPFS and the Filecoin protocols. Responsible AI pilots have been initiated with experts from the open source, trust and safety, climate mis/disinformation communities to establish proper guardrails for the model’s deployment.  Additionally, the ECI partnered with Khalifa University and inclusion consultants RSSC to develop an instruction fine-tuning (IFT) pilot that will incorporate the perspectives of marginalized groups of individuals — those who are often most impacted by climate change.

Daniel Erasmus, CEO Erasmus.AI:
“Breakthroughs come from seeing new horizons. Three years ago, when we conceived ClimateGPT we realized that our planetary-scale corpora places us in a unique position to help accelerate the change to a sustainable future. This is more than an AI technical achievement, it is designed to accelerate our social intelligence together for the transition ahead. Policymakers, business leaders, and researchers can hopefully benefit from the decision support that this platform provides, to move us a little bit closer to a sustainable future.”

Christian Dugast, PhD. Chief Scientist for LLMs, AppTek:
“To ground our answers, we make use of novel AI methods to support each answer with objective facts found in a focused set of domain-specific documents. More importantly, our IFT training set has been designed to support both completion and citation mechanisms, to teach the system to provide well-summarized answers and retrieve only the documents that are relevant to the prompt.”

Ariana Fowler, Head of Research, EQTY Lab:
“The need for a new generation of responsible and sustainable AI strategies to address global challenges has never been greater. ClimateGPT drives action-oriented innovation by contributing to open source research and providing enterprise-ready solutions. With this launch, we are excited to be sharing a vision for how diverse, mission-driven stakeholders can come together to introduce new public AI utilities. Our future is a shared one and we look forward to furthering collective climate intelligence."

The complete scientific paper can be downloaded at this link.

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About The Endowment for Climate Intelligence
The Endowment for Climate Intelligence (ECI) believes Artificial Intelligence can be developed and maintained responsibly by humans.  The ECI brings together stakeholders in AI and climate research alongside members from enterprise and civil society to use new governance methods and regenerative economics to strengthen planetary knowledge. As a not-for-profit endowment, recurring revenue from any commercial use of the model is reinvested to allow the ECI to subsidize access free of charge to qualified researchers and make future investments to evolve the model going forward.

About Erasmus.AI
Erasmus.AI is a pioneer in breakthrough AI solutions and the originator of the field of AI-assisted scenario planning in partnership with the Digital Thinking Network. For over two decades, Erasmus.AI has provided world leaders and the Fortune 1000, AI solutions based planetary scale datasets and pipelines connecting 40 NLP Engines, for entity extraction at web scale with instant curation across billions of documents. Erasmus.AI provides unique breakthrough insights to track climate change and drive climate intelligence as it happens.

About AppTek
AppTek is a global leader in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies for large language models (LLMs), automatic speech recognition (ASR), neural machine translation (NMT), natural language processing/understanding (NLP/U) and text-to-speech (TTS) technologies.
By combining cutting-edge AI research with meaningful and transformative real-world applications, AppTek's world-class scientists deliver industry-leading solutions for organizations across a breadth of markets including call centers, enterprise, public sector, media and entertainment.

About EQTY Lab
EQTY Lab builds responsible and trusted AI innovations through transparent and accountable tools. Their flagship product is the AI Integrity Suite, an applied cryptographic fabric that enables equitable governance of AI data objects and algorithms. Use cases for EQTY span multiple generative AI and ML applications across industries in the public sector, life sciences, and media.

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