Not long ago, we were asking if AI would save the climate. Now we’re asking if it will wreck it.

The truth is somewhere in between. But it’s easy to see why sentiment swung so radically.

When the AI race kicked off, we were promised rapid breakthroughs in materials, a business model revolution, and a radically more intelligent energy economy. But many people feel like we got hulking gas plants, higher electricity prices, and broken emissions promises instead.

Behind the scenes, AI is working its way into every corner of the clean energy industry, across forecasting, basic research, product design, and resource dispatch. And researchers continue to advance these tools for the benefit of clean solutions. 

So what’s the real story? Is AI still a positive force for the climate?

This week, Priya Donti joins the show to tackle this question. Priya is an AI researcher, MIT professor, and co-founder of the non-profit Climate Change AI. In 2019, she co-wrote a paper with a group of leading AI researchers on how the technology can be used for climate — and explicitly warned not to treat it as a silver bullet.

Priya talks about where AI is delivering, why claims got so inflated, the limits of general purpose models, and how she thinks about risk.

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