Incredible Deng’s pragmatism in shamelessly importing Japanese industrial management techniques to bolster china’s nascent industries
Including full on cultural exchange with a former enemy state all for the sake of modernization
🚨if you care about fixing NEPA environmental permitting OR are looking for new high-quality domain text corpuses to build LLMs on top of...
DOE just released a 3.6B token corpus of federal permitting documents on huggingface!
This corpus includes...
Ian Buck, now VP at Nvidia, developed the precursor to Nvidia's CUDA known as Brook as part of his PhD .
And look who funded the seminal 2004 paper that introduced the concept of programmable GPU's:
Small update: I’m starting a joint role as an AI and Supply Chain Policy Advisor at DOE!
I’ll be splitting time b/w my host office in Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains on critical mineral policy and the new Office of Critical and Emerging Technologies on all things AI
in some personnel news: I’ve joined the Dept of Energy as an Energy Supply Chain Fellow (via ORISE) in the Office of Infrastructure!
Send me your obscure supply chain tips and say hi if you’re in DC 👋
Fixed-price contracts have much better incentives than cost-plus contracts.
If Boeing can't make money on fixed-price contracts, then that's a Boeing problem, not a government contracting problem.
Much more to come here, but one small announcement:
DOE was awarded $6M to use AI to augment federal permitting staff for environmental reviews across the federal government by federal permitting council
in some personnel news: I’ve joined the Dept of Energy as an Energy Supply Chain Fellow (via ORISE) in the Office of Infrastructure!
Send me your obscure supply chain tips and say hi if you’re in DC 👋
Whew this was a big one 😮💨
A huge lift from the whole team at DOE and UST over the past year but we just got $4B for clean energy manufacturing, critical materials, and industrial decarb out the door!
Looks like GSA is listening - $30M from inflation reduction act being put to deploy new clean technologies, including germicidal UV, in federal buildings!
Highly underrated solution for fighting pandemics:
Germicidal Ultraviolet Light
“GUV can easily and silently kill half of the germs floating in indoor air every two minutes or less.”
On many dimensions, this is better than masking, testing, or ventilation/filtration.
Struck by how much of the technology we need today can be summed as better *filters*, for separating:
- salt from water
- CO2 from atmosphere
- minerals from extracted ore
- viruses from the air
- gates from source/drain (semiconductors)
📢I'm excited to share the Department of Energy's Frontiers in AI for Science, Security, and Technology (FASST) initiative roadmap is now live!
This is the DOE's flagship proposal on how the DOE + our 17 national labs can provide a national AI capability for the public interest:
Your friendly reminder that while many US agencies are talking about AI safety, there is only one US agency with the compute, capabilities, and resources today that is actually doing it 🙃
For anyone working on this, the dept of energy has a live request for information on this exact topic from yours truly
We’re looking for insights on market conditions and feedback on ways the US govt can tackle these problems
Tell all your critical mineral friends to respond!
📝new RFI for critical materials dropped!
Very excited to share something I've been working on at DOE for awhile now. We're looking for input on critical material market dynamics and feedback on various ways DOE can address challenging market conditions...
Yesterday, the DOE released a major fact sheet on everything we're doing on AI for energy (and energy for AI)
🧵A few highlights from the fact sheet (including a few things I got to work on!):
About a year ago, I filled out a random form I found on Twitter with some half-baked thoughts and it turned out to be one of the most important forms I filled out in 2021.
You should share some of your thoughts on this form too!
You know who else didn't believe in 1-on-1's, kept employees around for life by raising their aspirations, and built a society-transforming technology?
Admiral Hyman Rickover!
Even as Naval Reactors grew, every sub commander and project officer reported directly to Rickover
Your timely reminder that DOE has DPA authority for transformers but has not received additional congressional appropriations to exercise this authority
New from me in FAS! 👇
How self-driving labs can end science stagnation and a research agenda for how USG can drive adoption of this emerging tech platform
Highly-skilled graduate students should be doing science, not grunt work.
Self-Driving Labs could be the key to freeing up scientists to find new ideas and drive disruptive research.
📝📈The
@WhiteHouseCEA
released its annual Economic Report of the President and for the first time (afaik) there is an entire chapter dedicated to housing!
The chapter title alone is promising: "Increasing the Supply of Affordable Housing"
Some highlights:
It’s striking the parallels in discourse b/w US industrial policy and late 19th cent Chinese reformers after contact with the west:
(1) modernized defense industrial base is key (including learning from other countries production techniques), rather than empty rhetoric
For all my AI friends who are interested in permitting:
@ENERGY
@PNNLab
just dropped a brand new LLM benchmark for understanding permitting documents (NEPAQuAD 1.0)!
Some more details 🧵:
I'm excited to share this brief blog I wrote in
@SciPolNetwork
on self-driving labs (SDL) as an emerging tech platform that scientific funders should pay more attention to!
🤖🧪So whats the big deal with self-driving labs?
For anyone interested in critical and emerging tech policy, my DOE office is hiring a fellow!
Can't say enough good things about the team, the exciting portfolio we cover (AI, quantum, semiconductors, and syn bio), and why DOE is actually the best agency
@nadeyi_
@chrismtolles
It's from
@StephanieArcusa
's paper on CDR standards . Paywalled, but there's also a preprint w the same figure . The figure's seared into my brain after I had the chance to chat with them on
#CDRHorizons
!
- 3000 NEPA EIS projects from EPA database
- 28,000 docs
- 4.8M pages
This is the largest publicly available, tokenized corpus of federal permitting documents out there - can't wait to see all the cool findings and applications ppl will build!
And now you can see some of the projects the Round 1 $4B of 48C investment tax credit helped support!
PS
#energytwitter
lots of good stuff on transformers 👀
Whew this was a big one 😮💨
A huge lift from the whole team at DOE and UST over the past year but we just got $4B for clean energy manufacturing, critical materials, and industrial decarb out the door!
I never imagined how much we could accomplish when I started
@RVA_YIMBY
just 7 months ago
Keep your eye on Richmond VA 👀 I’m telling y’all, we’re on the up and coming!!
RVA YIMBY is 2/2 🥳
✅abolish parking minimums
✅ADUs by-right
Stay tuned for what we’re doing next to advocate for abundant and affordable housing in the greater Richmond region!
Fun fact of the day about Department of Energy and AI: in 2017, DOE worked with Nvidia on their original NVlink, which is one of their key competitive moats on chip-to-chip interconnect
Some fun weekend readings, exploring the intersection of critical minerals w/ armed conflict and the history of the US National Defense Stockpile (NDS)
A thread 🧵:
Very excited to share my first authored report at DOE!
Check it out for how AI can transform our power grid and the clean energy economy
(and then share everything we missed!)
📝A DOE AI for Energy report!
It surveys how AI can be applied to power grids and across the economy (transportation, buildings, manufacturing, agriculture, etc)
In some critical mineral news-of-the-day: DOE Loan Program Office just clarified that mining and extraction of critical minerals is eligible for title 17 loans!
I spent the past year learning about carbon removal with
@openaircollect
/
@ActuateOrg
and I wanted to share some of the sources+communities that helped me understand this relevant climate topic:
(all views my own, linked materials != endorsement)
Incredible to see how much a small community of housing advocates can do in just 2 months 🙌
Keep an eye out on RVA - we're working to be a model for how cities can build abundant and affordable housing for everyone!
🎉🎉 Richmond City Council has unanimously repealed parking minimums! 🥳🥳
A huge thank you to our dedicated advocates and partner organizations who made this possible. This marks the beginning of our journey towards abundant and affordable housing for everyone in RVA!
Ppl (esp AI researchers) underestimate how much sensitivity/inaccuracy are in these models, which is why I’m very skeptical of a lot of AI based surrogate modeling
We’re not in a foundation model era, we’re just doing “garbage in, garbage out”
We see exactly the same thing for simple electrolytes. If you cannot get sodium chloride pairing free energy right you are not going to get protein folding right. I often don’t point this out because I don’t want to offend senior researchers.
This corpus is part of DOE's voltAIc initiative, which is using LLMs to accelerate permitting processes
This corpus was developed in partnership with
@PNNLab
- you can find more details about their work on this project here:
I spent the past 2 years at ARPA-E and Actuate Innovation (all views my own tho) exploring climate scenarios and tech (EV fast charging, carbon removal, mass timber, etc)
only to arrive at the conclusion that building housing in cities is our most underleveraged climate solution
Huge milestone for our metascience team at
@IFP
.
The leadership at
@NSF
is committed to using experiments to improve how the agency funds research and innovation.
We’re honored to support their work.
Free hackathon project: the entire text of federal regulations (CFR) is ~800MB, so you could probably train gpt-3.5-turbo on the whole thing for ~$400.
@Angry_Staffer
@Sosanyo
know anyone who would be interested in that?
We love open-source energy software 🤗
But seriously - this is rly exciting for the energy modeling community and shows what an empowered federal bureaucracy can do for producing public goods
At
@EIAgov
, we’ve just released our National Energy Modeling System (NEMS) – used to produce the Annual Energy Outlook – as an open source product, with additional EIA code to follow.
Excited to have
@ScVanValkenburg
and
@mistyfor3chopt
come out and speak with the Chinese American community in short pump today!
Awesome to see our traditionally disengaged community come out and voice their concerns and questions in this important local/state election🗳️
A thoughtful paper on AI for comp mat sci and the challenges of bridging DFT-based predictions over to real world:
- first off, the success: 2 new phases of a material discovered with AI!
- But with significant human intervention to experimentally realize new phases...
📝I'm excited to finally publicly share one of the first things I worked on when I joined the Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains (MESC) at the Dept of Energy - our 2023 Supply Chain Progress Report!
Inspired by
@jjding99
's discussion on gatekeeping in ChinAI, this week's issue of ML4Sci is some reflection on misinformation+COVID19, how to deal with the flood of preprints, why "expert twitter" isn't the answer, and where newsletters fit into this
RCTs are great for finding policy levers that are marginally additive, but they offer no guide on how to build institutions or effect systematic change
diversity of epistemic methods is still important !
Love this quote from one of my favorite development researchers, Lant Pritchett, on RCTs.
RCTs can be incredibly valuable for certain questions. But we already know the big things that people need—education, healthcare, infrastructure, etc. The real problem is how to implement.
An under-appreciated fact:
60-80% of nuclear's LCOE comes from paying off interest. That is insane.
Factory-made small reactors could solve this:
Instead of 1 large reactor that takes 7 yrs to build,
install 10 small reactors (2 per yr), minimizing debt.
👇🧵
I spent the past month digging into phytomining and submitted a response to an RFI by
@ARPAE
()
Here's a quick 🧵on what I've learned about phytomining (1/n):
Low critical mineral prices are causing real pain in the domestic market and hurting our ability to onshore supply chains
Here are 3 things the Dept of Energy is doing to support the critical mineral industry:
People say fields like media studies and philosophy have no real life application
But I think about McLuhan every day when deciding whether to teams chat or email someone
I'll be sharing about this corpus release and other AI initiatives we have at DOE at a public workshop hosted by
@lowercarbon
@CrusoeAI
@OpenAI
next week in SF!
Calling all AI builders interested in fighting climate change:
@lowercarbon
@OpenAI
@CrusoeEnergy
are coming together to host Hacking for Clean Energy, from June 28-29 in SF.
We also currently have a kaggle competition open, which is running LLM evaluations on a QuAD benchmark specific to understanding permitting documents - deadline is june 30!
For any US-based college/grad students looking for spring/summer 2023 internships, I compiled a list of climate policy internships here:
There's no better time to join the
#energytransition
!
thinking about how the sky is falling in the US bc of low, 3% load growth but China is building renewably powered generation at 7% YoY w/o breaking a sweat
if energy is the fundamental input for an economy, then this is not a good long-term trajectory for us...
Okay. 2023 China Annual Power Data:
- Power generation increased 6.9% YoY (nice)
- Installed capacity of renewables hit 1450 GW, exceeding the installed capacity of thermal power
(a meaningless milestone)
- Renewable energy met 30% of power consumption (a big milestone)
Just like with companies, there exists a geopolitical innovators dilemma
Is the US willing to learn from other countries, including China, what policies/practices are successful in promoting critical industries and adapt relevant and translatable ones?
Incredible Deng’s pragmatism in shamelessly importing Japanese industrial management techniques to bolster china’s nascent industries
Including full on cultural exchange with a former enemy state all for the sake of modernization
We all know the “American factory” documentary shows Fuyao employees singing a company anthem in China but…
Did you know IBM had a hymnal of corporate anthems in the 1940’s?
So much of improving government is in building better processes: energy permitting, immigration reform, etc
which is to say, I finally got around to reading the PPBE commission report (released last month)! A few exciting recommendations:
A fascinating history, with interesting parallel (and divergence) b/w the cyclical US steel industry in the 20th cent (and resulting consolidation) and the investment patterns of Chinese manufacturing today in polysilicon / lithium batteries (and resulting cut throat competition)
When it was formed, US Steel was by far the largest company in the US, with a market capitalization equal to 6.7% of US GDP. Today, it's not even in the Fortune 500.
This week on Construction Physics, I look at the long fall of US Steel.
Big news in the carbon removal space today: DOE is enabling external voluntary CDR funders to fund DOE-vetted carbon removal credit suppliers
This is the kind of innovative work you get with well-funded state institutions and talented civil servants!
🎉Excited to release this data brief on AI4Science with the great folks over at
@CSETGeorgetown
!
We provide qualitative and quantitative evidence of a growth in the use of AI in published scientific research + recs for USG on how to invest in this growing domain
The key political economy point here is that industry has to believe demand pull subsidies will decline over time and it is more fruitful for them to innovate and compete, rather than lobby for extension of subsidies
I think the lesson here is pretty clear and does not need overstated subsidy estimates to make the point.
The key to any successful industrial policy subsidy program is providing support to a domestic industry to achieve scale and profitability so subsidies can be gradually
timely paper on how constrained, limited public compute impacts science R&D
@johnLmckeon
@JustineBoudou
show that limited compute not only limits research productivity/output but also the amount of risk-taking in research/willingness to explore new fields!
How do resource constraints impact innovation?
In a new working paper with
@JustineBoudou
, we tackle this this question from a unique angle, studying the impact of supercomputing constraints on the rate and direction of science. 1/N
Link to paper:
The Dutch Public Broadcasting Service came out with a documentary on ASML
You really get a sense throughout the interviews of technological wonder and complexity, from the people who build it everyday
Here are some notable quotes:
Excited to share my work with
@VCNVAorg
on how VA state legislature can build sustainable housing that is abundant and affordable for all Virginians
🏠Building more missing middle housing is a climate solution folks!
"the slow blade penetrates the shield"
incredible that after 6 centuries of advance in radar and air defense, flying cardboard boxes were the defeat strategy
Another one I’ve worked on for awhile - a Request for Information (RFI) from
@energy
that drills down to the component level of clean energy supply chains
This RFI is a BFF bc it informs DOE’s development of granular supply chain analysis, but also…
We went from
- incandescent -> LED
- internal combustion -> EVs
- thermal generation -> solid state solar panels
Looks like we might have a path to solid state heat pumps next?
?
This is also the same point
@benedictevans
has made - we regulate software systems by industry/use e.g. software in healthcare, in cars, in banks, etc
NOT by the actual software itself, because that’s rarely the right policy abstraction layer
With historically low housing stock & high prices, families are struggling for the basic security of a roof over their heads. I am proud to carry the “Yes In God’s Back Yard” legislation alongside
@DelBetsyCarr
, which will empower our congregations to develop affordable housing:
2011 chinese netizen essay advocating for the "industrial party" is both telling and prescient, given the state of Chinese industrial development today
My New Year’s resolution: tell every university administrator I know about the global entrepreneur-in-residence program through H1B
This one trick is such a free win for local universities and cities that want to be come the next SF, Austin, Seattle,…
We've had a busy week at the Department of Energy's Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains (MESC)!
(aka by ✨favorite ✨DOE office)
Here's what we've been up to:
@AmandaAskell
I think one critical diff is that the Bible has a heavy focus on virtue ethics (rich people are pitied not bc they're rich but bc what being rich does to them), whereas EA is more utilitarian, outcome-based. See woman with alabaster jar (Mark 14), poor widow offering (Luke 21)
@akshaykagrawal
This is unfortunately somewhat true at Berkeley as well. Depending on EECS vs. CS, most end up learning some linear algebra and some circuits (because Berkeley teaches lin. alg. in the EE16 series), but often students just end up learning neither
Super excited to finally publish this memo on steps the Biden administration can take to build back with a better power grid (tldr more distributed resources and more transmission).
Thanks to the awesome folks at
@dayoneproject
for supporting me throughout this journey!
President Biden committed to reenergizing the nation's power infrastructure. In a new Day One memo,
@charlesxjyang
proposes building a cleaner energy grid by accelerating the adoption of distributed energy resources & expanding transmission capacity.
@AgForestryVA
Have you looked into how the state can further support the integration of private secondary forests in Virginia into voluntary carbon markets?
Increasing forestry +biomass carbon sequestration in VA is a great way to sequester CO2 while investing in rural communities!
Very excited to share this DOE Request for Information (RFI) on a new initiative - Manufacturing Capital Connector - which pairs private capital with public investment tax credits to support manufacturing in America! 🏭🇺🇸
Send us your feedback and ideas!
@AlecStapp
A college friend of mine was a chinese intl student
been working at NVIDIA on compilers since post-grad, trying to get the H1-B
This past week was their last chance and they didn't get it
Now they're probably going back to China
AI policy is just immigration policy honestly
If you find yourself on the CDC's Leading Causes of Death website(), you'll notice a common cause of death is "Unintentional Injury". It's a bag of different causes, but one of the most common subcategories is "motor vehicles" aka deaths b/c of cars🚗
📝A DOE AI for Energy report!
It surveys how AI can be applied to power grids and across the economy (transportation, buildings, manufacturing, agriculture, etc)
Excited I got to contribute to the
#AI
section of this report - thanks to
@IntercalationSt
and BatteryBits for putting together this awesome resource for the
#Battery
community!
We are excited to share the BATTERY REPORT in collab with BatteryBits. This report is 130+ pages long and summarizes the most significant developments in the battery industry in 2021. Happy reading! DMs open!
#BatteryReport2021