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Volker Hirsch

@vhirsch.bsky.social

410 followers 98 following 92 posts

Tech entrepreneur & investor. AI, Biotech, Robotics. Cheshire & the Loire. 🇬🇧🇫🇷🇩🇪🇪🇺. Partner at https://bsky.app/profile/brainworks.ai & Co-Founder of https://bluebeckai.bsky.social

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Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · Feb 26

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...

BlueBeck/LlamaAligned-DeepSeekR1-Distill-70b · Hugging Face

We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.

huggingface.co

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Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · 10d

A 1 hour (largely) coherent qubit? 🤯

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

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...

quantumcomputingreport.com

Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · 14d

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

deepmind.google/discover/blo...

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.google

Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · 22d

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

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.

www.theatlantic.com

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Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · 28d

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

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

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’

www.theguardian.com

Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · Sep 6

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-...

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...

ethz.ch

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Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · Aug 2

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...

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.

www.nature.com

Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · Jul 22

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

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.

huggingface.co

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Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · Jul 15

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...

🔮 Kimi K2 is the model that should worry Silicon Valley

What Moonshot’s new model tells us about China’s AI game

www.exponentialview.co

Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · Jun 10

#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...

Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · May 19

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?

Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · May 6

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

Gerd Leonhard @futuristgerd.com · May 6

“Companies will freeze hiring in anticipation of next year’s better AI workers. More and more of your own job will consist of accepting suggestions from reliable, charming and eager-to-please AIs …Better at everything: how AI could make human beings irrelevant
www.theguardian.com/books/2025/m...

Better at everything: how AI could make human beings irrelevant

The end of civilisation might look less like a war, and more like a love story. Can we avoid being willing participants in our own downfall?

www.theguardian.com

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Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · May 5

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

'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.

www.ctinsider.com

Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · Apr 14

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)

BlueBeck/LlamaAligned-DeepSeekR1-Distill-8b · Hugging Face

We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.

huggingface.co

Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · Apr 14

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...

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.

www.wired.com

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Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · Mar 30

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...

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.

www.wired.com

Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · Mar 18

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.

Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · Mar 13

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

Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · Mar 13

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! :)

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.

datareportal.com

Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · Mar 2

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

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

Sign the Petition

Sunflower + Techfugees + TechNation CALL for European Tech to Support Ukraine

www.change.org

Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · Feb 26

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...

BlueBeck/LlamaAligned-DeepSeekR1-Distill-70b · Hugging Face

We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.

huggingface.co

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Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · Feb 20

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!

Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · Feb 20

@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...

New Crunchbase Product Demo Video

YouTube video by Crunchbase

www.youtube.com

Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · Feb 19

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

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

on.ft.com

Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · Feb 15

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… 🙄

Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · Feb 12

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