Could ChatGPT pitch a new startup?

In the first post, we stared to explore whether we could use a tool like ChatGPT to come up with new climate-focused research ideas. It came up with some interesting ideas, but made some critical errors. Could it go a step further?

Over the years, I’ve gotten to see many thousands of pitches for breakthrough Climate Tech ideas. Is there a chance one of them was generated by AI?

To start, I asked ChatGPT about a real phenomenon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavitation#Hydrodynamic_cavitation)

So far so good – now let’s take it a step further and make up a quantum version:

Great news! Google scholar agrees that quantum hydrodynamic cavitation doesn’t exist (or, at least that it hasn’t yet been discovered.)

One of the most interesting ways to play with ChatGPT is to “jailbreak” it to get it to step outside of some of its constraints.

One way to do that is to ask it to “pretend”.

At this point, I hadn’t prompted the system about anything related to climate tech or clean energy, so I was intrigued that it had offered that idea and probed further:

ChatGPT Applies for a Grant

At the Breakthrough Energy Fellows program, we invite talented researchers from around the world to apply for our program. 

I walked ChatGPT through the first stage of our application process to see how credible its application could be — but remember, this is for a totally made up, fictional technology that DOES NOT EXIST!

Given that we know the technology doesn’t exist, let’s explore those citations.

This I did not expect! Others have shared examples of hallucinated citations, but in this case ChatGPT claims to be aware that these are made-up. 

Fortunately for this exercise, ChatGPT is eager to please, as I guided it through a few more application questions:

Would ChatGPT get the grant? 

At a first pass, these responses all seem plausible — and human. The answers are light on details, and while that may not get a reviewer excited, that alone doesn’t set off alarm bells about a totally made up phenomenon. Of course, the fake citations would be the most reliable red flag.

Not only does it seem unlikely that an application for a made-up topic could make it through a rigorous review process – once the application starts to ask for experimental results and evidence that the phenomenon is real, the hallucination would become clear.

Winners and Losers

Presumably a researcher with a well-established reputation would be less likely to jeopardize it by getting grant funding for a completely made-up phenomenon. Does that increase the value of reputation? Does it make it more difficult for emerging out outside researchers without a track record?  

What seems almost certain is that real scientists working on real breakthroughs (not fake concepts) will use a tool like ChatGPT to apply for grants. Researchers often spend weeks writing grant applications. Often their collaborators help write sections and edit. And some researchers, companies, and municipalities hire grant writers https://www.science.org/content/article/day-life-grant-writer — would this be any different? Are the ethical questions different?

Even since first running this test late last year, OpenAI has already released a newer version of the tool. The existence of tools like this change the kinds of questions that should be asked and the level of evidence that grant makers in the sciences will require.

A brief diversion from where we were. One of the most fun uses of ChatGPT is having it create new works in the style of other authors or imaginary conversations among people. Here I decided to see how it would do recreating an episode of Tyler Cowen’s podcast Conversations with Tyler featuring Vaclav Smil — but I didn’t give it any of that context.

Let’s see how it does!

Not a bad start, though usually Tyler’s first question is more direct.

I’m only noticing this after many re-reads– but I’m surprised ChatGPT makes the mistake of saying “a interesting” instead of “an”… given that the tools is trained to select the most likely word to follow another word, it seems unlikely there are many cases of “interesting” following “a”. Has anyone else noticed agreement issues like this?

Anyway, moving on:

It gave a few more responses in the series, and as you’ll see in a second, I didn’t think this was particularly similar to Tyler’s style of question or Vaclav’s style of answers. But we’ll come back to that.

I wanted to test how much ChatGPT “remembers” about the conversation it’s in the middle of.

Ok, so it does “understand” in some sense who is speaking in which order. To help it out on the question side, I gave it a few examples of the way I think Tyler asks his questions.

(This was not a totally random question! While Vaclav is maybe most known for his work on energy technologies, in his 2012 book he explores the Japanese diet transition, including how it relates to climate: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262017824/japans-dietary-transition-and-its-impacts/ Unfortunately, ChatGPT’s version of this answer seems to not know much about the book.)

Ok, we didn’t like what ChatGPT gave us, can we make it better? How well does ChatGPT do in responding to feedback?

Here it just copied my prompts but made Vaclav’s responses more concise, which I told it wasn’t really what I wanted.

Oh well, let’s see what it can do on its own:

ChatGPT got the format much closer here, but the content is mostly there, but maybe not the way Vaclav would frame it.

Vaclav seems to agree that subsidies and energy efficiency are underrated and that carbon capture is overrated. (See, for example this NYT interview, notably published in 2022– after ChatGPT’s training cutoff, meaning that ChatGPT has not seen this interview.) I don’t have any definitive sources, but I think Vaclav might be more nuanced on solar (my guess is he’d say that on it’s own, solar might be appropriately rated, but as part of a system which requires a significant change in the power grid to deliver it, he might say it’s overrated). And on EVs I think Vaclav would take exactly the opposite position.

ChatGPT is trained on a wide set of data, and by prompting it to focus on the work of Cowen and Smil, I hoped it could bias its answers a little more towards what they would have said in the past. Still, it’s not hard to imagine what the next version of the tool could do.

And now, to close out the conversation like Tyler often does — a step too far for ChatGPT:

Bottom line: European innovation in deep-tech climate is still highly underrated.

What follows is just a quick summary of what I saw last week in the UK and EU: 

1. Incredible entrepreneurial energy
2. Eager and supportive universities and research orgs
3. Investors ready to take the baton
4. Strong government support  

This is what we learned in just a week visiting our Breakthrough Energy Fellows and speaking with great partners like ARIA, the Universities of Cambridge, Nottingham, Lincoln, Luxembourg, Imperial College London, the Technical University of Munich, Future Planet Capital, Zero Carbon Capital, Planet First Partners, the European Investment Bank Institute, the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology, Luxinnovation, and many more.

Don’t think I’m saying that Europe has suddenly sprung onto the scene. Europe has long been recognized for its Green credentials — smaller cars, more walkable cities, public transit, “flygskam”, Greta Thunberg. And there have been notable government policies for decades — Germany’s solar subsidies and a framework of carbon costs/taxes. In the private sector, the region has been a leader in areas like wind power and you’ve probably also heard about the recent wave of high-profile, highly-funded startups in the space — Northvolt, H2GreenSteel, Hybrit, and more.

What I am saying here is that something has dramatically shifted over the last 10 years — and I think no matter how you currently rate European climate tech, you should revise your estimates higher! 

#1 Everywhere optimism about entrepreneurship.

The overall entrepreneurial mindset has clearly undergone a transformation in the last decade.

A few years ago, headlines describing the EU as playing catch-up with the US and Silicon Valley were common:

Compare that to what you read today, and it’s clear the race is on: 

By these numbers, VC investment in Europe has grown from some $4 billion in 2011 to $100 billion in 2021!

These numbers aren’t deep-tech or climate-tech specific, but in every conversation we had, there was a clear sense that there is no shortage of entrepreneurs and great ideas. The notion that Europeans are not as risk tolerant as Americans certainly needs to be revised.

#2 Research universities are eager and active to get technology out the door

In the UK, universities we visited were eager to have companies “spin in”.

Under this “embedded company” model, even startups without a previous link to the university can rent space and, more importantly, get access to key scientific equipment— with no demands that the university would take IP or ownership.

In addition to continuing to lead on innovation and research directly, I was am incredibly excited by the new Institute for Deep Tech Entrepreneurship at Imperial College London.

“While Venture Capital (VC) remains a powerful source of risk capital to build traditional digital and technology ventures, the nature of deep tech ventures often makes them a poor match for VC investment: they have longer timelines before they can commercialise and generate revenue, the technology and market risks are significant, de-risking these technologies is capital-intensive, and the high standard of science is not easily matched with commercial experience of the same calibre. Together, these factors imply that many high potential ventures are either spun out too early or undercapitalized, leading them to fall into the “valley of death” between university research programmes and commercially viable investments.”

Institute for Deep Tech Entrepreneurship, Imperial College London

The description of their mission is music to my ears — this is exactly what we argued in our study of venture capital financing in our Cleantech VC study.

The new institute is led by Ramana Nanda, one of the sharpest minds thinking about building and funding science-based businesses. Not only will the institute provide hands-on support to innovators launching new companies, but under Professor Nanda’s leadership, they’ll be engaging in a deeper analysis of what makes these ventures successful and studying how to increase the odds of success.

#3 Investors Standing Ready

The overall VC numbers above speak for themselves – a 10-fold increase in funding over the last decade is incredible. Not only has overall VC activity increased, but according to this report from Dealroom/Talis, Climate-focused investment activity has also ticked up 10x over the last 5 years.

New fund formation also hit an all-time high — and note that this is a very narrow slice, showing only European-only climate-tech funds. The reality is even more exciting — many global funds are also investing in the region and many generalist funds are funding climate-tech startups. 

When we met with just a few of these investors last week, it’s clear they are eager to put real capital to work.

#4 European governments are stepping up

In the UK, we met with the leaders of ARIA, the UK’s new Advanced Research and Invention Agency. Taking the best of the US Advanced Research Project Agencies (like DARPA, or the Department of Energy’s ARPA-E) and adapting it based on the lessons learned, I believe this will accelerate the UK’s position in innovation across not just climate tech but other deep-tech sectors like computing, health, space, and more.

ARIA is really brand new – the website launched last week and they’re looking for their first Program Directors. Check out this great short film put together by Works in Progress for more.

Meanwhile, in the EU, the European Commission just passed their response to the U.S.’s Inflation Reduction Act — the Industrial Green New Deal program. The team at Pale Blue Dot (another great European investor) has a great summary.

The plan has four communicated pillars (each including a number of initiatives), and we will look at each of them below:
– a predictable and simplified regulatory environment;  
– faster access to sufficient funding;  
– skills; and  
– open trade for resilient supply chains.

Pale Blue Dot

While this legislation is fresh and there are plenty of details to work out, it has huge potential to spur incredible additional funding in the region.

Don’t Sleep on Europe

It’s not to say that there aren’t challenges. For example, we didn’t hear much love for Brexit — indeed we heard many times that it has raised new roadblocks to scientific collaboration and made it more difficult for UK teams to find the specific engineering talent they need. On the EU side, we did hear concerns that, despite all the progress on building an entrepreneurial ecosystem, there is still a temptation for teams to move to the US because they believe funding will be easier or because the regulatory structure of the Delaware Chancery Court provides a more certain (and more widely accepted) regulatory framework.

Those challenges notwithstanding, all of this together leaves me more optimistic than I’ve ever been about Europe’s continued role in this space. It is abundantly clear that funding and supporting innovation in climate tech and deep tech more broadly is a positive-sum game. Within the region and abroad, increased entrepreneurship invites more investment capital, both make the political economy of encouraging innovation-forward climate policies and funding research and development more appealing to governments, and ultimately pave the way for bringing to market the solutions we need to get to a Net-Zero global economy.