Matthias Qian

@NandoDF @notmisha @ziyuwang @nalkalc @egrefen Your advocacy also inspired this academic paper which tested whether university stakes stifled innovation: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf… 🫡

10 years ago, a few months after Google acquired DeepMind, they soon acquired two startups that came together at Oxford: DarkBlueLabs and Vision Factory. theguardian.com/technology/201… The startups included Prof Phil Blunsom, @notmisha, @ziyuwang, @nalkalc, @egrefen, Karen Simonyan, @karlmoritz, @maxjaderberg, Prof Andrew Zisserman and me. We joined DeepMind at the beginning and had the privilege to contribute to the creation of one of the greatest AI hubs in the world. We were fortunate - it was a golden era for AI exploration. As part of the acquisition, Phil, Andrew and I made it a condition that Google had to give @UniofOxford CS and Eng departments 6 million (2 for each of us). Google had to agree. The 3 profs stated the money should be used for international scholarships. Our scholarships became known as the Oxford DeepMind scholarships. Many benefited and Oxford grew into a strong AI university. Some of the money was diverted by the CS head of department and a few others to create an endowed scholarship at Hertford college. At Oxford I taught my deep learning courses that to this day continue being relevant and widely watched. I also brought in powerful GPU machines into the CS department thanks to @nvidia. I am very proud of what Phil and I achieved for @CompSciOxford. Years later I tried to change the way Oxford incubated startups (I felt they were being greedy to the point of stifling innovation). This caused a lot of friction, but I did it because I wanted to improve the opportunities for students and profs at Oxford. That is what my resignation letter stated. It was a call for more support for innovation in the UK. Eventually positive changed happened. globalventuring.com/university/eur… A few months ago, Oxford celebrated the 10 years of this. They forgot to invite the actual donors that made it possible, Phil and me, but fortunately my wonderful students were there to remind them. As @j_foerst, an exceptional AI professor at Oxford says, there is a difference between value and advantage. Not rewriting history, being generous, and being thankful are important values. Today I was very proud to show my daughters a place that will be forever in my heart. Big thanks to all my colleagues, students and staff at Oxford CS and Linacre. It was a brief but very exciting and rewarding time 💙

@minchoi @sama Same here.

@sama Still don't see 4.5 on my list (have Pro plan) 🤔

GPT-4.5 is ready! good news: it is the first model that feels like talking to a thoughtful person to me. i have had several moments where i've sat back in my chair and been astonished at getting actually good advice from an AI. bad news: it is a giant, expensive model. we really wanted to launch it to plus and pro at the same time, but we've been growing a lot and are out of GPUs. we will add tens of thousands of GPUs next week and roll it out to the plus tier then. (hundreds of thousands coming soon, and i'm pretty sure y'all will use every one we can rack up.) this isn't how we want to operate, but it's hard to perfectly predict growth surges that lead to GPU shortages. a heads up: this isn’t a reasoning model and won’t crush benchmarks. it’s a different kind of intelligence and there’s a magic to it i haven’t felt before. really excited for people to try it!

@GregoryBesharov @AstorAaron How did you dig that one up?!

LOL - So it looks like the "condoms in Gaza" were being sent to the province of "Gaza" in...Mozambique. If the Administration doesn't like the idea of helping fight STDs in Africa (like PEPFAR) then they should say so. But they thought you'd think of that other Gaza.

@nntaleb You are drawing on old ideas here: sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

With DeepSeek, investors are (re)learning that those who come up with an *innovative* idea are almost never those who will make money from it. Eg: Clive Osborne made the first laptop computer & went bust. Same with car, planes... Next: electric cars.

@AmirSariri @sstern_mit Beautiful. Also, congrats to your MS publication! :-)

First day of my one-year visit to MIT TIES started with a beautiful view. Deeply grateful to @sstern_mit for this opportunity. Bonus joy: the privilege of working in James Utterback’s office.

@GregoryBesharov @elerianm Isn't Satoshi Nakamoto already the strategic bitcoin reserve?

I’m getting lots of questions this morning about why Bitcoin is trading above $100,000, up sharply from its mid-October price level of $66,000. Here is one way to think about this: As I have noted before, one of the big changes taking place in the US post-election is the emergence of a new ("counter") elite that is much more comfortable with innovations and disruption, is pro-liberalization and de-regulation, and is generally less risk-averse. It is a change that, relative to what has been in place until now, significantly enhances prospects for wider institutional and retail adoption of crypto assets and, therefore, their role in the payments eco-system and as part of investment portfolios. Now, add to that the inevitable element of speculative demand that is typically associated with rapid price moves, and the result is eye-popping valuation gains. #markets #crypto #bitcoin #cryptonews #cryptoassets

@nathanbenaich Applying automation for household chores is important, with robots finally doing something useful for us and not taking away our valued jobs...

if for every laundry folding robot company we had one hypersonic missile company or next-gen therapeutics company or frankly anything else that is substantive and important to our world, that would be a good outcome

@elonmusk Isn't the number of pages of regulation a crude measure?

Wow 😍

@j_foerst @FLAIR_Ox What happened to Oracle for Research?

My group at Oxford (@FLAIR_Ox) is talent rich but GPU poor (both compared to industry), so adding more GPUs would be a win for open science, but is difficult to finance from grants. Does anyone have leads for possible donors? Christmas is coming up so I guess I am allow to dream

@j_foerst Just look at the height of the walls surrounding most colleges, not the best way to facilitate communication amongst scholars, but great communication within colleges.

something odd about Oxford (& I wonder if it's the same at other places): I commonly find out about what is happening in AI _at Oxford_ by talking to people _not_ at Oxford. Oxford essentially uses the rest of the world to compensate for the lack of internal communication tools

@j_foerst @NandoDF @EugeneVinitsky I was there with Christoph! :-)

Cold emails are hard and good ones can change a life. Here is my email to @NandoDF that started my career in ML (at the time I was a PM at Google) docs.google.com/document/d/1_u… Real effort (incl feedback) went into drafting it. Thanks to @EugeneVinitsky for nudging me to put it online

@MarcusOwen5 @IrlbeckSteve @guangli_zhang Can you share your ethics approval?

This work is joint with Will Gerken, @IrlbeckSteve , and @guangli_zhang Here is a link to the full paper: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf… This is an early draft and the project is still evolving. Comments and questions are welcome

Ever wonder what happens behind the scenes when the SEC investigates firms? My co-authors and I did, so we built a database tracking SEC-associated smartphones to study how they monitor firms. A key finding: firm insiders that sell around a visit avoid large losses thread...

@BillyTWildi It was a good idea to hedge for this black swan event. And uncertainty if Biden will run is large now, reflected in the confidence bands around the 50% chance of him being the dem nominee.

My Biden bet on winning democrat nomination has not gone as expected: 1. Biden is probably has <50% chance of being dem nominee (betting market agrees) 2. Harris was underated after the debate, and I managed to get a 10-1 bet on her as a hedge. She is now arguably the favourite.

@ben_golub GPT4 gets it right

@j_foerst Except for Tesla, which has come crashing down.

The hype is open-ended.

❤️

🎉Excited to share my new WP (which also happens to be my job market paper!)🎉 How does online recruitment impact the geography of the labour market? Full paper here sites.google.com/view/mariabalg… and a 🧵below:

In a great (& destructive) irony, Mechanical Turk is just AI, now. The MTurk crowdworking platform is a major place for researchers (and companies) to get humans to do small tasks & experiments. But this paper finds 33-46% of Turkers use LLMs to do tasks. arxiv.org/abs/2306.07899

This study sheds light on the role of university stakes in the spinout process, bringing data-driven insights to a debate that has long been lacking objective data.

Our findings reveal no statistically significant impact on the amount raised, securing substantial funding rounds (> £15M and > £25M), or company valuations.

Are university stakes making university spinouts unfundable? #UniversitySpinouts #Innovation A new study with Thomas Hellmann and Junida Mulla offers insights into the effects of university equity stakes on spinout fundraising. Link to study: tinyurl.com/ytk7srrr A short🧵: