Last week, New York City hosted two events which wear out the shoe leather (and sometimes the patience) of New Yorkers and visitors alike: the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), and Climate Week NYC.  

Climate Week began very much on the sidelines of UNGA; it is a tribute to climate’s salience and $2 trillion annual investment scale that today, thousands attend Climate Week without engaging the UN at all. I’ve been attending for more than a decade, and find it both engaging and exhausting. It is hard to tell just how many events, official and unofficial, are underway and at the same time, it is that very abundance that adds value. It is Metcalfe’s Law in action, and also an effort in optimizing for point-to-point networking in a sea of potential contacts. 

To put it another way: it’s impossible to attend everything, there’s a real fear of missing out on key information, and even the best distillations, such as Sightline Climate’s, leave everyone wanting more. 

It’s an information challenge, so Halcyon has treated it as one. We ingested hundreds of individual news sources, announcements, and LinkedIn and blog posts into one document set.  We sent an LLM to Climate Week, in effect, and I’ve been asking it questions. I started with something basic: 

In the interest of readability, we've shortened the displayed list of citations 

So far, so good - but like any good summary it left me wanting more. This matter-of-fact statement of what took place also lacks a counterfactual. These same discussions have been underway for a decade, at least. Refinement is necessary, and welcome. 

So, I asked about financial sector commitments made last week in New York. Here the query tells us something specific to this year. 

And of course, I want to know more. Here, the large language model has composed a tight description of the 14 major bank and financial institution commitments to triple nuclear energy capacity by 2050. This response tells me most of what I need to know in one paragraph. 

The U.S. Green Bank 50 leaves me wanting more. I know that green banks are proliferating, but I was not aware that there were now 50 (at least), or that they had formed a partnership amongst themselves, launched during an already news-filled week in New York. So, I asked for more, and received it.

This summarization adds facts and figures and also details which I find useful such as the fact that the consortium has been self-organizing for a year. However, it points only to two sources — the Financial Times and industry publication Utility Dive — which given scarce space and many competing publishing demands, did not list out the remaining 40+ green finance institutions taking part. For that, I had to jump out into the wider internet in search of the launch press release, a lengthy but informative document that Halcyon’s sweep of Climate Week mentions did not capture. 

As a seasoned reader of press releases and financial institution plans, my mind immediately explores the next information I would want out of the GB50’s future posture: its organizations’ actual (not planned) financial commitments; a detailed accounting of what projects work where, and why; an ability to compare and contrast initiatives within and across markets, and so on. It is likely that such information exists, but it is equally likely that it is hard to parse when distributed across 50 institutions in almost every US state.  

Large language models, though, are becoming increasingly expert readers. And when directed at an authoritative body of information (such as the official records of 50 financial institutions), LLMs will be important classifiers and processors of progress in energy transition and decarbonization.

Even after ingesting hundreds of documents, announcements, and news stories about Climate Week from dozens of sources, I still want to know more. The information surface for a week-long gathering with thousands of participants and hundreds of official and unofficial events is vast.  As always, Halcyon treats such a challenge as a job for technology, in the service of experts doing their own work to their utmost.

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