๐ AI ethics and sustainability are two sides of the same coin.
In our new blog post with Dr. Sasha Luccioni, we argue that separating them (as is too often the case) means missing the bigger picture of how AI systems impact both people and the planet.
Ethical and sustainable AI development canโt be pursued in isolation. The same choices that affect who benefits or is harmed by AI systems also determine how much energy and resources they consume.
We explore how two key concepts, evaluation and transparency, can serve as bridges between these domains:
๐ Evaluation, by moving beyond accuracy or performance metrics to include environmental and social costs, as weโve done with tools like the AI Energy Score.
๐ Transparency, by enabling reproducibility, accountability, and environmental reporting through open tools like the Environmental Transparency Space.
AI systems mirror our priorities. If we separate ethics from sustainability, we risk building technologies that are efficient but unjust, or fair but unsustainable.
AI for Scientific Discovery Won't Work Without Fixing How We Collaborate.
My co-author @cgeorgiaw and I just published a paper challenging a core assumption: that the main barriers to AI in science are technical. They're not. They're social.
Key findings:
๐จ The "AI Scientist" myth delays progress: Waiting for AGI devalues human expertise and obscures science's real purpose: cultivating understanding, not just outputs. ๐ Wrong incentives: Datasets have 100x longer impact than models, yet data curation is undervalued. โ ๏ธ Broken collaboration: Domain scientists want understanding. ML researchers optimize performance. Without shared language, projects fail. ๐ Fragmentation costs years: Harmonizing just 9 cancer files took 329 hours.
Why this matters: Upstream bottlenecks like efficient PDE solvers could accelerate discovery across multiple sciences. CASP mobilized a community around protein structure, enabling AlphaFold. We need this for dozens of challenges.
Thus, we're launching Hugging Science! A global community addressing these barriers through collaborative challenges, open toolkits, education, and community-owned infrastructure. Please find all the links below!
๐ New blog: Maintain the unmaintainable โ 1M+ Python LOC, 400+ models
How do you stop a million-line library built by thousands of contributors from collapsing under its own weight? At ๐ค Transformers, we do it with explicit software-engineering tenets, principles that make the codebase hackable at scale.
๐ Inside the post: โ One Model, One File: readability first โ you can still open a modeling file and see the full logic, top to bottom. โ Modular Transformers: visible inheritance that cuts maintenance cost by ~15ร while keeping models readable. โ Config-Driven Performance: FlashAttention, tensor parallelism, and attention scheduling are config-level features, not rewrites.
Written with @lysandre,@pcuenq and @yonigozlan, this is a deep dive into how Transformers stays fast, open, and maintainable.