Announcing ClimateGPT: the First Opensource Foundational AI Platform

• 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.

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.

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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.

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.

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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.”

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