The director of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center – National Center for Supercomputing, Mateo Valero, maintains that his field of study and artificial intelligence are now essential in scientific advances and, more particularly, in climate change: “It is the only way of studying it. In fact, he emphasizes that what happened with DANA, which mainly affected Valencia, “science predicted everything”. Today, he explained, the center he manages collaborates with the Military Emergency Unit (UME) in a program aimed at predicting any type of disaster and training society in response, in the framework of a model similar to that applied in Japan, so that people know how to react. act in the event of, for example, an earthquake.
Valero, who participated in the XXIII Congress of CEDE Leaders in A Coruña, placed climate change and associated risks as one of the main areas of application of artificial intelligence. Also disasters like earthquakes: with current tools, we can calculate the impact on a building located 300 kilometers from the epicenter. But technology also has a downside: “The machines consume a lot of energy and are very expensive. They are creating a divide at the national level. Those who don’t have it [supercomputadores, acceso a la inteligencia artificial]they won’t be able to do research. He demanded that access be “more democratic”.
In the design of supercomputers, there is a “fundamental problem”, which is the need to reduce their energy consumption, said the director of the CNS – BSC. According to Valero, the aspect in which we can make the most progress is that of algorithms: being able to do the same thing with fewer operations. Training the models – you have to provide data to the artificial intelligences so that they “learn” – also requires a lot of energy. He gave the example of Chat GPT, which had a lot of training consumption, but “mainly because it has a lot of queries.” The sector, he stressed, needs green energy and has asked Spain to produce it.
Valero extends applications to medicine, with the “great global challenge” of creating a digital twin of the human body, and the enormous amount of data managed by public administrations. The importance of these technologies is reflected in the geopolitical battle between the United States and China over the production of the next-generation chips on which they are based.
The expert also reflected on the relationship between artificial and human intelligence and asked not to be afraid of advancements. Computers, he said, “will never have common sense or intuition.”
