Maybe this is the first example of, well, AI offsetting some of the emissions costs of generative AI. From venturebeat.com:
“Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) research lab DeepMind has achieved a remarkable feat in computer science through its latest AI system, AlphaDev. This specialized version of AlphaZero has made a significant breakthrough by uncovering faster sorting and hashing algorithms, which are essential processes utilized trillions of times daily by developers worldwide for data sorting, storage and retrieval…In a paper published in the science journal Nature, DeepMind asserts that AlphaDev’s newly discovered algorithm achieves a 70% increase in efficiency for sorting short sequences of elements and approximately 1.7% for sequences surpassing 250,000 elements, as compared to the algorithms in the C++ library. Consequently, when a user submits a search query, AlphaDev’s algorithm facilitates faster sorting of results, leading to significant time and energy savings when employed on a large scale.”
Wait, I can’t forget DeepMind’s leap in solving protein structures…