It is likely you’ve heard about some of the drama surrounding Open AI in the past week. Nearly 1 year ago, Open AI took the world by storm with Chat GPT – an exponential advance that arguably brought conversations around AI to the mainstream.
With all the noise and news cycles focused on AI, it is easy to forget that there are two other exponential advances in the works – especially around RNA based therapies and renewable energy. Here are a couple of updates on these that caught my eye.
Let’s start with RNA based therapies. I wrote about Doctor Katalin Karikó in early 2021 when I learnt about her pioneering leadership on RNA based therapies that helped marked the beginning of the end of the COVID pandemic. I made a comment about her story having all the ingredients for a Netflix/Amazon limited series show. Now that she is a 2023 Nobel prize winner*, I’m hopeful that will happen.
The amazing thing about RNA based therapies is that we’re just at the beginning of what will likely be an incredible decade for medicine. Herpes, Malaria, Sickle cell anemia, and heart disease are all ailments with RNA based solutions currently being developed/tested. There’s going to be plenty more coming here.
Next, onto renewables. There’s always something amazing to say about solar these days. Chile, for example, hit 60% of electricity from renewables in the first 10 months of this year. That is incredible. And such progress on renewables is the main reason we are tipped to avoid the 3 degree C climate tipping point.
However, we are still on track for 2.5 degrees C – sadly, this isn’t something we want to be “on track” for as the consequences are still going to be severe. And if we’re going to bring that down further, we’ll need more options for energy storage that don’t depend on rare-earth metals like Cobalt and Lithium.
That’s why Swedish company Northvolt’s “Sodium-ion” battery is a true breakthrough. We need more such alternatives.
The pace of change in AI is a lot faster (months) than that in renewable energy (years) and biotech (~decade). But their impact is just as profound and worth keeping an eye on.
*Funnily, I was so inspired by her work then that I’d reached out to her for an interview for this blog. She kindly responded and asked if we could try a few months later (this was just as the vaccines were rolling out around the world). I didn’t follow up. Perhaps I should have taken my chance before the Nobel prize came. :-)
