
Past: 👨🔬 RS DeepMind 2y, Midjourney 1y 🧑🎓 DPhil AIMS 4.5y 🧙♂️ RE DeepMind 1y 📺 SWE Google 3y 🎓 TUM 👤 @nwspk
Oxford, England
Joined August 2009
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Ever wondered why presenting more facts can sometimes *worsen* disagreements, even among rational people? 🤔
It turns out, Bayesian reasoning has some surprising answers - no cognitive biases needed! Let's explore this fascinating paradox quickly ☺️
Andreas Kirsch 🇺🇦 retweeted
Congrats to Sofia for having the courage to resign and speak out!
This is also very important:
Staff are scared to speak out about AI safety and its uses in warfare because their employment contracts prohibit them from publicly criticising the company.
bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cmre…
Thanks for saying this and I hope you can put external pressure on Google to be better and not have such clauses in the future
The public might have been misled in how open Google is when it comes to allowing valid criticism
The fact there are such chilling effects (and potentially others) should give everyone goosebumps
The industry simply cannot be allowed to regulate itself as long as it follows such practices
Important, and I'm glad this is finally public. Google DeepMind researchers are under in perpetuity non-disparagement clauses forbidding them from ever speaking critically of the company. I'd already confirmed this with multiple people.
Yes, some ex-employees have spoken out nonetheless. But it has also discouraged others from doing so. And yes, it most certainly has a chilling effect with regards to discussions on safety and risk.
Others have written compellingly about how important the ability to speak freely and critically is, especially on topics like safety and risk. And what a testament to the research employee community's coordination and hard-won bargaining power it has been to get there at other companies.
GDM burn that commons by having this. And everyone who signs burns that commons too. Let's get it changed.
Andreas Kirsch 🇺🇦 retweeted
Important, and I'm glad this is finally public. Google DeepMind researchers are under in perpetuity non-disparagement clauses forbidding them from ever speaking critically of the company. I'd already confirmed this with multiple people.
Yes, some ex-employees have spoken out nonetheless. But it has also discouraged others from doing so. And yes, it most certainly has a chilling effect with regards to discussions on safety and risk.
Others have written compellingly about how important the ability to speak freely and critically is, especially on topics like safety and risk. And what a testament to the research employee community's coordination and hard-won bargaining power it has been to get there at other companies.
GDM burn that commons by having this. And everyone who signs burns that commons too. Let's get it changed.
Congrats to Sofia for having the courage to resign and speak out!
This is also very important:
Staff are scared to speak out about AI safety and its uses in warfare because their employment contracts prohibit them from publicly criticising the company.
bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cmre…
Andreas Kirsch 🇺🇦 retweeted
We formally announced Mirendil less than 4 months ago. Today, I'm excited to share an important milestone for:
Pretraining at scale without a pretraining team.
Mirendil's mission is to solve Recursive Self-Improvement (RSI) and use it to democratize frontier AI development, ultimately accelerating science and technology. At Mirendil, when we think about RSI, we think holistically about the company as an intelligent entity that self-improves toward its goal. From that perspective, the most powerful notion of acceleration is reducing the time and resources (number of human experts, compute, and other costs) needed to achieve ambitious goals.
Given that pretraining is perhaps the most important yet most challenging part of frontier AI development, we decided to run an ambitious controlled experiment: Starting fully from scratch, can we significantly reduce the time, number of human experts, and compute resources needed to go all the way to successfully pretraining a strong coding model at scale?
Mirendil-Base is the result of this experiment. Our first pretrained model was built by one researcher in 3.5 months, with less than $10M in compute. This includes all the research and small-scale experiments it took to get there, as well as the final training run.
The recipe holds up as the models get bigger. For reference, Mirendil-Base is in the 100B-500B parameter range, Mirendil-Base-Large in the 500B-2T range, and Mirendil-Base-XL in the 2T-10T range.
We're beginning to see a world where a single researcher, empowered by AI, can take on work that once required an entire research organization. As these systems improve, the bottleneck shifts from the size of a team to the ambition and judgment of the people directing them. This has profound implications for who gets to build AI and, ultimately, who gets to push the frontiers of science and technology forward.
We’ll share independent evaluations, post-training benchmarks and API-access sooner than you think so stay tuned!
Congrats to Sofia for having the courage to resign and speak out!
This is also very important:
Staff are scared to speak out about AI safety and its uses in warfare because their employment contracts prohibit them from publicly criticising the company.
bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cmre…
The clause also lacks the necessary exemptions for protected disclosures 😡
I believe this non-disparagement clause can have a chilling effect on employees speaking out about serious concerns
Note: when I signed this contract, I wasn't employed by Google yet, so it itself is not covered by this confidentiality agreement and nothing I've ever signed has made it so 😊
"""
Employees at Google have told the BBC that staff are scared to speak out about AI safety and its uses in warfare because their employment contracts prohibit them from publicly criticising the company.
"In principle I'm not allowed to criticise Google for the duration of my life," Sofia Liguori told the BBC. But she decided to do so "because I believe it's important for these things to be known and I also think that talking about facts is not criticising".
Liguori added that at Google "people are scared of retaliation and putting their career at risk. You feel you are being watched, you can't speak."
"""
Andreas Kirsch 🇺🇦 retweeted
Excited to announce that I’m moving to Beijing and starting a professorship in AI safety at Tsinghua University’s College of AI!
Here I explain why: sorenmindermann.substack.com…
Andreas Kirsch 🇺🇦 retweeted
No one changes the world alone
Introducing Ampersand - the first model built for us. Ampersand is a collaborator trained to help people achieve their individual and collective goals. In multi-month simulations, users collaborating with Ampersand accomplished more than with Fable and other frontier models
Available to everyone through our API
Andreas Kirsch 🇺🇦 retweeted
Breaking: Elon Musk ordered the Starlink slowdown that blindsided Ukraine on.wsj.com/4sgcpBv
Andreas Kirsch 🇺🇦 retweeted
10 Downing Street is recruiting a Director of AI in the No10 Policy Unit, where I work. They will advise the Prime Minister on AI.
This is an important role for the UK!
Andreas Kirsch 🇺🇦 retweeted
We @bold_lab_ai are hiring a large cohort of home and overseas students for Fall 2027 entry. If you’re excited about discovering the next paradigm of open-source AI and want to work on ambitious, exploratory, but scalable ML, please apply. More application details and exact timeline coming soon, in the meantime please register your interest here bold-lab.ai/opportunities/ 🦋🦋🦋
I do understand why people have been so annoyed at Anthropic's Fable bio safeguards. They really trigger for essentially unrelated (mildly related) prompts with no actual safety concerns whatsoever. I appreciate the concern and I'm glad there are other models I can use
Fields Medalist Richard Borcherds on OpenAI proofs:
"i think what people are getting upset about is that they'e slowly realizing that they are dumb and somehow blaming this on AI, even though it's not really AI's fault"
finally, someone who gets it
Claude Docs are cool, but why can't we export all of them a suitable open format? Charts only export as images, which completely breaks data portability and prevents you from editing them later. We really need a fully reversible, open-format export option 🙏
Andreas Kirsch 🇺🇦 retweeted
1/4 Today, we’re releasing Mercury 3. Mercury 3 is by far our most powerful model and the most intelligent diffusion LLM ever released. It outperforms GPT-6 Luna and Haiku 5.5 on quality while running at 1000+ tok/sec.
🤖 Made with AI
I remember talking to @JanMBrauner about models being able to detect whether they're actively being trained etc and we tried to brainstorm this. Didn't think of floating point operation order being a potential giveaway. Actually that's a good reason to make sure training and inference absolutely matches 😅
Andreas Kirsch 🇺🇦 retweeted
When I was writing Unreal Engine 1, my time was divided as follows:
- Around 30% went to seriously deep coding on hard problems: assembly language texture mappers, C++ BSP trees, data persistence, object oriented systems design, and networking.
- Around 70% was just typing and refactoring large bodies of code needed for a complete engine feature set. This was not hard, and while I was doing it my mind was mostly on the deeper coding topics, thinking and planning for what's next. It didn't feel much different from vibe coding today, except that it was just me typing code on an IBM Model M keyboard rather than prompting it and reviewing the results.
So, it has always seemed perfectly logical that we would rely on AI for that 70%, once the AI could do it with a similar quality standard as we could, which has never been perfection. It came as no surprise that, after a few years of AI model evolution, it was able to take the reigns on that 70% and free up programmers' time for more valuable tasks.
What's more of a surprise is the emergence of AI as a sort of insta-Carmack able to solve hard technical problems quite cleverly and often cleanly, and that it's able to reason about and work in complex 3D scenes both by operating the tools and by directly understanding the raw data files.
I abandoned assembly language in 1998 when out-of-order CPUs made much simpler C/C++ code faster, and never I missed it. If prompting through architectural documents, concept art, and design plans can transcend typing code and tweaking vertices, that will enable developers to spend their time on higher-level, higher value technical and creative tasks.
What matters is the end product, whether it's a game or an engine. Anything developers can do to try out more ideas and make better software and games faster is a win for everyone.





















