🌎 AI ethics and sustainability are two sides of the same coin.
In our new blog post with Dr. Sasha Luccioni, we argue that separating them (as is too often the case) means missing the bigger picture of how AI systems impact both people and the planet.
Ethical and sustainable AI development can’t be pursued in isolation. The same choices that affect who benefits or is harmed by AI systems also determine how much energy and resources they consume.
We explore how two key concepts, evaluation and transparency, can serve as bridges between these domains:
📊 Evaluation, by moving beyond accuracy or performance metrics to include environmental and social costs, as we’ve done with tools like the AI Energy Score.
🔍 Transparency, by enabling reproducibility, accountability, and environmental reporting through open tools like the Environmental Transparency Space.
AI systems mirror our priorities. If we separate ethics from sustainability, we risk building technologies that are efficient but unjust, or fair but unsustainable.
🤗 Sentence Transformers is joining Hugging Face! 🤗 This formalizes the existing maintenance structure, as I've personally led the project for the past two years on behalf of Hugging Face! Details:
Today, the Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing (UKP) Lab is transferring the project to Hugging Face. Sentence Transformers will remain a community-driven, open-source project, with the same open-source license (Apache 2.0) as before. Contributions from researchers, developers, and enthusiasts are welcome and encouraged. The project will continue to prioritize transparency, collaboration, and broad accessibility.
We see an increasing wish from companies to move from large LLM APIs to local models for better control and privacy, reflected in the library's growth: in just the last 30 days, Sentence Transformer models have been downloaded >270 million times, second only to transformers.
I would like to thank the UKP Lab, and especially Nils Reimers and Iryna Gurevych, both for their dedication to the project and for their trust in myself, both now and two years ago. Back then, neither of you knew me well, yet you trusted me to take the project to new heights. That choice ended up being very valuable for the embedding & Information Retrieval community, and I think this choice of granting Hugging Face stewardship will be similarly successful.
I'm very excited about the future of the project, and for the world of embeddings and retrieval at large!
How Financial News Can Be Used to Train Good Financial Models 📰 Numbers tell you what happened, but news tells you why. I’ve written an article explaining how news can be used to train AI models for sentiment analysis and better forecasting. Hope you find it interesting!