Link to the article piece: www.nesta.org.uk/feature/miss...

🏛️ Policy trends:
Electricity price reduction is climbing the policy agenda. Recent debate has centred on long-term ways to bring down prices for households and businesses. That’s key to helping heat pumps compete with gas boilers on running costs. (7/7)

This combined heat pumps, community energy storage, EV car clubs and solar panels to cut bills and upfront costs. (6/7)

🔬 Research funding:
UK research has shifted from optimising heat pumps to green finance, mirroring the investment trend.

Example: Rossendale Borough Council received over £2 million for a place-based decarbonisation demonstrator in terraced streets. (5/7)

IKEA: Meatballs, flat-packs and now heat pumps. The company is now offering heat pumps in several European countries, including the UK since late September, through partnerships with manufacturers such as Aira. (4/7)

💡 Venture funding:
Finance for low-carbon heating is getting a green light from investors. Global investment in 2025 rose sharply for businesses offering loans and financial products to support uptake. (3/7)

In this edition, we looked at innovations to make low-carbon heating more affordable, a key barrier in our mission to decarbonise home heating in the UK. (2/7)

The author doesn't really address the wider implications of deterministic LLMs, but can imagine the reproducibility of outputs could be very powerful in terms of trust.

Link to the blog: thinkingmachines.ai/blog/defeati...

(6/6)

Used ChatGPT in study and think mode as well as prompting it to use socratic questioning to really improve my understanding of this area. (5/6)

They've managed to create deterministic LLMs at inference time with some penalties for efficiency, but the results are pretty cool. I found their blog quite a long read, as I had little familiarity around the intricacies of these calculations and how they relate to GPUs. (4/6)

However there are different strategies to get around this, e.g. running sums over single cores in a GPU. This is what 'Thinking Machines' have been doing with implementing batch-invariant calculations for LLMs. (3/6)

This is caused by something called floating point non-associativity. In Maths, we can do (a+b)+c =a+(b+c) but this is not the case when doing calculations in computers, the order matters. (2/6)

That's what we are building with Nesta's Policy Atlas tool!

Read about our alpha tool user testing and what's next for the project, here: www.nesta.org.uk/project-upda... (2/2)