Impact AI Climate Resilience with Max Evans from ClimateAi
AI and machine learning are growing in significance as far as adapting to climate change is concerned. During today’s episode, I welcome Max Evans, founder and CTO at ClimateAi, to discuss the topic of climate resilience and how technology is driving progress in this arena.
Max begins our conversation with an overview of the important work he is doing at ClimateAi, before weighing in on the role of machine learning in the AI startup space. He describes in detail the chain of different machine learning models and the challenges associated with high dimensionality and quality in data of this nature. We touch on Max’s preferred methodologies, and he unpacks the role of literature searches, a lack of historical data, and the technological advancements he is able to leverage in his work at ClimateAi today.
Key Points:
- An introduction to Max Evans, Founder and CTO at ClimateAi.
- What ClimateAi does and why it is important for adapting to climate change.
- The role of machine learning in AI startups.
- The chain of different ML models involved in making weather and climate data usable.
- Tackling the challenge of high dimensionality and quality in machine learning data.
- Projecting and adding broader impact functions to produce more meaningful data.
- The hybrid between Stanford design thinking and the lean methodologies Max prefers.
- What it means to include a literature search in the process.
- Technological advancements leveraged by ClimateAi today.
- Navigating a lack of historical data with synthetic data.
- Micro and macro perspectives on climate decisions.
- What the AI process is really about.
- Max’s goal for ClimateAi in three to five years.
Quotes:
“ClimateAi’s mission is to climate-proof our economic system. We want all businesses to make climate-informed decisions.” — Max Evans
“ML is a core mindset of AI startups in terms of how you solve problems, how you start with the exploratory data analysis, the hypothesis building, the baseline and investigation, the modeling, and the many loops.” — Max Evans
“Don't start with the technology or the product, but start with a customer need.” — Max Evans
“It wouldn't have been possible before, and it is definitely possible now to start building forecasts of the climate.” — Max Evans
“Newer methods are developing so rapidly that the edge of what's possible continuously shifts outward.” — Max Evans
“[The AI process] is really about building a data-driven, hypothesis-driven, need-solving culture in both your technological team and in your broader team at large.” — Max Evans
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