Volker Hirsch

I mean: not my circus, not my monkeys, but I can say that a Covid vaccination in France costs €7.20, and that is for visiting foreigners who don’t pay into their system. Best wishes from Europe.

Microsoft Executive Vows to Halt AI Work If It Imperils Humanity Microsoft Corp. consumer artificial intelligence chief Mustafa Suleyman is bent on creating a super intelligence that’s “aligned with human interests” and pledged to halt such work if it posed a threa...

Embedded in this article is an interview with @mustafasuleymanai.bsky.social. I find him one of the voices most worthwhile listening to when it comes to AI and its impacts. 👇

www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Omnilingual ASR: Advancing Automatic Speech Recognition for 1,600+ Languages We’re introducing Meta Omnilingual Automatic Speech Recognition, a suite of models providing automatic speech recognition capabilities for over 1,600 languages.

Meta's FAIR is still twitching meaningfully, it seems.

ai.meta.com/blog/omnilin...

Here’s some interesting new research (from Samsung’s AI unit). They call it “tiny recursion model”, which beat the big boys with a 7 million (yes, an “m”) parameter model that does recursive reasoning to improve its guess. That is a model 0.01% the size of its competitors.

arxiv.org/html/2510.04...

A thought: Softbank acquired #Graphcore for some $600m (as per the @data.ft.com - BTW, why isn't the "proper" #FT on here?). It also holds a roughly 10% stake in #OpenAI. With the latter's spree on acquiring compute from, like, everyone, will Masa just flip Graphcore to OpenAI for a nice uplift?

Alice & Bob Sets New Bit-Flip Stability Record for Superconducting Cat Qubits - Quantum Computing Report Alice & Bob has announced new research results showing that their cat qubits can resist one of the main errors in quantum computers, the bit-flip, for more than one hour. The company measured hour-lon...

A 1 hour (largely) coherent qubit? 🤯

quantumcomputingreport.com/alice-bob-se...

Gemini Robotics 1.5 brings AI agents into the physical world We’re powering an era of physical agents — enabling robots to perceive, plan, think, use tools and act to better solve complex multi-step tasks.

DeepMind puts out pretty cool features with their new Gemini Robotics models, including motion transfer.

deepmind.google/discover/blo...

AI Watchdog - The Atlantic The Atlantic's ongoing investigation of the books, videos, and other media used by the world's most powerful tech companies to train their AI models.

@theatlantic.com launches its #AI #Watchdog where you can interrogate datasets on whose data LLMs have been trained: www.theatlantic.com/category/ai-...

Albania puts AI-created ‘minister’ in charge of public procurement Edi Rama, PM, says digital assistant Diella will make Albania ‘a country where public tenders are 100% free of corruption’

Albania appoints an AI as minister to take corruption out of procurement. Nice use case.

www.theguardian.com/world/2025/s...

Apertus: a fully open, transparent, multilingual language model EPFL, ETH Zurich and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) released Apertus 2 September, Switzerland’s first large-scale, open, multilingual language model — a milestone in generative AI for...

Here's an interesting new model: a Swiss-made foundation model crafted by #EPFL, @ethz.ch and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) that is open and multi-lingual #AI

ethz.ch/en/news-and-...

Google AI model mines trillions of images to create maps of Earth ‘at any place and time’ The system will save time spent on processing satellite data, researchers say — but they hope the tech firm will share more about how it works.

Oof, seriously cool: @google released a thing called #AlphaEarth, effectively a virtual satellite view of earth anyway you want it. #AI #EO

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

common-pile/caselaw_access_project · Datasets at Hugging Face We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.

So here's a massive #data set of almost the entire body of US case #law: huggingface.co/datasets/com... #AI #LegalAI

🔮 Kimi K2 is the model that should worry Silicon Valley What Moonshot’s new model tells us about China’s AI game

Have you met #Kimi2 yet? Chinese, open source, built on top of #DeepSeek’s architecture and sports 1 trillion parameters.

Here’s a write-up by @azeem.bsky.social
: www.exponentialview.co/p/kimi-k2-is...

#Meta is said to be ramping up its #AI efforts (I wonder what @yann-lecun.bsky.social might say to that; I thought he was doing OK - short of a Nobel…). Link below. Also this screenshot from the other place… 👀😱🤯

www.reuters.com/business/met...

I watched some UK commentators spitting their usual Brexit feathers over fisheries. You all know that over 50% of the British fishing quotas are owned by Dutch, Spanish and Icelandic companies, don’t you? Aside from the fact that fisheries represents 0.03% of the UK economy, whom are we kidding?

Very much on point and what I have long been musing about in my talks on #AI and #TheFutureofWork 👇

'AI is already here': Why some Connecticut school districts are embracing AI in the classroom Some Connecticut schools have tested out the integration of artificial intelligence in the classroom and plan to continue encouraging AI usage.

#AI in #education seems like a battleground. It shouldn’t be. Here’s an example: www.ctinsider.com/news/educati...

BlueBeck/LlamaAligned-DeepSeekR1-Distill-8b · Hugging Face We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.

And if you want to play, here's an 8B model of DeepSeek R-1 that is better in remembering history (i.e. you can ask it about China): huggingface.co/BlueBeck/Lla... (built by our very own @bluebeckai.bsky.social)

Small Language Models Are the New Rage, Researchers Say Larger models can pull off a wider variety of feats, but the reduced footprint of smaller models makes them attractive tools.

Size matters, yes? But at what cost? Possibly owing to my background in mobile (with its inherent constraints), I have been looking at cost per compute for a long time. So it's nice to see this getting some airtime on @wired.com: www.wired.com/story/why-re...

OpenAI’s Deep Research Agent Is Coming for White-Collar Work The research-focused agent shows how a new generation of more capable AI models could automate some office tasks.

Have you played with #OpenAI's #DeepResearch tool? It shows how an agentic approach can go pretty far. Here's @wired.com's take on it: it's coming for your job! (as I have been talking about for about a decade...):

www.wired.com/story/openai...

This is an image by @reuters.com showing what happened in the US: the deportation of suspected (not convicted) gang members who were deported by unidentifiable soldiers (the military is NOT part of law enforcement) whilst ignoring a court order. There no longer is the rule of law in the US.

At around dinner time EST today, the EU should just declare 1,000,000% tariffs on MAGA hats, then watch... #tradewars

DataReportal – Global Digital Insights All the numbers you need to understand how people all over the world are using the internet, mobile devices and apps, social media, and e-commerce.

For my fellow data nerds, here's an amazing resource I only stumbled across today: datareportal.com is a gorgeous (and big - all of 640 [!] pages) view of what is happening online, kinda literally. Enjoy! :)

Sign the Petition Sunflower + Techfugees + TechNation CALL for European Tech to Support Ukraine

Here's a call for the European tech sector to support Ukraine 🇺🇦. I signed it. Will you, too?

www.change.org/p/sunflower-...

BlueBeck/LlamaAligned-DeepSeekR1-Distill-70b · Hugging Face We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.

Our very own @bluebeckai.bsky.social retrained #DeepSeek R-1 to remove certain, erm, historical memory lapses, shall we say. You’ll find it here: huggingface.co/BlueBeck/Lla...

Agreed. For better or worse: I mainly use it to establish the status quo of *a* startup and, as such, reliable primary data is important to me, too!

New Crunchbase Product Demo Video YouTube video by Crunchbase

@crunchbase.bsky.social switching from providing a historical view of *actual* things happening (to which I subscribe) to going all in on #GenAI predictions is a pretty bold move. Congrats, *I guess*... Can we perhaps have both? Anyway, here's their video intro

www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHGu...

Microsoft claims quantum breakthrough after 20-year pursuit of elusive particle US tech giant says it has harnessed a new state of matter to create the basic building blocks of a quantum machine

New quantum computing breakthrough from Microsoft? A new state of matter? 🤯

on.ft.com/4hITgCm

Microsoft claims quantum breakthrough after 20-year pursuit of elusive particle

If you’re on iOS (I assume it’s similar on Android), they’re increasingly introducing some AI features. On Apple, one of these is to highlight “priority messages.” Well, turns out the scammers have better AI: all phishing messages I get are being prioritised… 🙄

So who has played with #OpenAI #DeepResearch yet? Do tell!