#4 Deeptech Analysed - Super enzyme that devours plastic in hours & DALLE - 2, the cutting edge technology generating images from a single text
What's happening this week? 28th November 2022
A super enzyme that devours plastic in a matter of hours, a breakthrough solution to the global plastic pollution?
Eden Djanashvili
What's going on?
Every year humans consume tons of plastics that end up building a global plastic waste which takes hundreds of years to degrade. Recycling can help reduce plastic waste however, it comes with drawbacks. The process requires a lot of energy and it’s not available everywhere. So far, plastics make up more than 7 billion tons of waste around the world and less than 10 percent of it has been recycled - according to the United Nations and the UN Environment Programme.
What does it mean?
A group of researchers at the University of Texas, found out, with the help of a machine-learning algorithm, that they were able to generate novel mutations to a natural enzyme called PETase. This variant could degrade PET or polyethylene terephtalate plastics from centuries to days. It is able to quickly break plastic down into smaller parts, a process called depolymerization. But it can also put those parts back together again, through repolymerization, to create an entirely new product in a matter of hours. This recycling plastic process has a huge advantage, compared to other applications, as it can work in the environment at ambient temperatures and scale it in a widespread industrial and environmental recycling processes.
Why should I care?
💸For markets: economically viable?
PET plays an important challenge when it comes to recycling as it represents up to 12% of all global waste and it is considered to be an everyday plastic used in water bottles, fruit packaging, etc. Even though plastic recycling costs more than new plastic because collecting, sorting, transporting and reprocessing plastic waste is expensive, new approaches such as DRAM (Dristibuted recycling and additive manufacturing) allow to recycle plastic through 3D-printing and create new products. It can provide corporations from every sector the chance to take a lead in recycling their products, earning thousands of money a year and envision a more circular plastics economy.
🧑🏿🤝🧑🏻For society: microplastics in human organs?
Until today we have depended massively on plastic as an inexpensive and durable material. However, it takes over 400 years (or more) to decompose due to its chemical structure becoming, since the late 20th century, a global problem. A significant amount of plastic that isn't recycled ends up in landfill, oceans or thrown into dump sites polluting and damaging our ecosystem. This situation affects directly humans as they end up eating plastic coming from what they ingest (in our marine life, animals can get caught in plastic objects, ingest the plastic and/or be exposed to plastic chemical which can alter their physiology over time). Recently microplastics were detected in human organs.
🔮What’s next: interplay between plastics, fossil fuels and climate change!
The OECD projects global plastic consumption rising from 460 million tonnes (Mt) in 2019 to 1,231 Mt in 2060 in the absence of strict policies. Growth will be fastest in developing and emerging countries like Africa and Asia, although OECD countries will still produce much more plastic waste per person in OECD countries by 2060 (238 kg vs. 77kg for non OECD countries).
Due to the enormous problems caused by the global burden of plastic waste on the environment, it is becoming increasingly important to find environmentally friendly methods for reusing plastic in a sustainable circular economy. This new enzyme discovery can make an important contribution to establish alternative plastic recycling processes.
At the same time, new fiscal and regulatory policies should be implemented to decrease the global plastic waste and plastic leakage such as:
Taxes on plastics, including on plastic packaging
Incentives to reuse and repair plastic items
Improved waste management infrastructure
We should look at how actions to reduce greenhouse emissions could decrease plastic pollution given the interplay between the plastics lifecycle, fossil fuels and climate change.
Dalle 2 - the cutting-edge technology generating images from a single text
By Lirone Samoun
What is going on?
Discover Dalle 2, an algorithm that can generate any image from a simple text. DALL·E 2 is a new AI system that can create realistic images and art from just a descriptive text you provide. Here's how it works: you put in a description of a picture, and after a dozen of seconds, the algorithm produces photos that are variations on that description. The diversity varies quite a bit depending on the prompt.
What does it mean?
AI is being implemented in a growing number of fields of application. Dalle 2 is based on an artificial intelligence technique of image creation called diffusion. In short, the goal of this algorithm is to take a noisy image and to build a new image little by little. The pixels will be modified until the desired image is obtained. To achieve very realistic images, the model has learned to recognize objects in the images but also to recognize the images between them as well as the relationships.
Why should I care?
💸For markets: disruptions in the AI market are coming up!
DALL-E 2’s capabilities have massive implications for marketers and businesses. For proof, look to OpenAI’s GPT-3 language model. This groundbreaking natural language generation model began as a research project. It was then opened up for commercial use, which caused an explosion of AI-powered content generation tools. Finally, it was exclusively licensed to Microsoft. The same is now happening with DALL-E 2. DALL·E 2 OpenAI customers can produce 5,000 images for the price of a graphic designer to produce a single image. Investors looking to gain exposure to the lucrative AI industry are considering DALLE 2. The tool is now commercially available, and we expect some serious opportunities—and disruptions.
🧑🏿🤝🧑🏻For society: the future of design, creativity at its most.
Tomorrow, many jobs will disappear, and others will be completely transformed. With this artificial intelligence, many jobs will be impacted:
(1) Designers: with DALLE 2 you can generate entire boards of drawings.
(2) Stylist: you can generate new clothes or even new styles.
(3) Advertising: you can create advertising campaigns with only a description.
(4) Architect: specify what you want and DALLE will generate your future design.
(5) Photographer or artist: you can generate any kind of images in an ultra-realistic way.
Tomorrow, you won't necessarily need these skills to generate great art. If you don't have creativity, the algorithm will do it for you. It could help artist to improve their final art but who will be the true owner of the work? DALL·E 2 could create imagery that goes beyond what we can imagine. No person in the world has a mental repertoire of visual representations equal to DALL·E 2.
🔮What’s next: more precise pixels are coming around!
Since the released of DALLE 2, many companies have been released their own model for creating new content to create more and more realistic and precise images. Today, even more, new diffusion models have been built to create videos from texts.
Side note: scientists have recently discovered a mushroom called "Pestalotiopsis Microspora" capable of eating plastic. It contains a chemical that break downs polyurethane (key ingredient in plastic) and turns it into organic matter naturally.