Building @getduodata. Founded @teralytics. CS @ ETH Zurich.
Berlin, Germany
Joined November 2007
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UBI is dystopian. Do we really want to be completely dependent on the state to finance our life?
An alternative could be to spread shareholding in the frontier labs / hyperscalers much more widely. The mechanism for that isn’t clear to me though. Elon giving every child SpaceX shares is a good start, but depending on the benevolence of those companies doesn’t seem to be the right approach either.
Peter Thiel's take on UBI is the most honest one I've heard from a tech billionaire:
It's not an ideology. It's a contingency plan.
His exact framing: "If we had runaway automation and we're building robots that are smarter than humans and can do everything humans can do — we probably have to have a serious conversation about Universal Basic Income."
Most people treat UBI as a left/right debate. Thiel's treating it as an engineering problem with a logical output condition.
The trigger isn't political will. It's the capability threshold — when machines cross from tool to substitute.
That's a very different conversation than "should we redistribute wealth." It's "what do we do when the labor market structurally breaks?"
The fact that one of capitalism's sharpest defenders is saying this out loud matters more than any policy proposal from the left.
Georg Polzer retweeted
interpretability might be the most important scientific problem in the world right now, as I don't think we can solve alignment if we don't know what we're building. I think I have good news about it. I co-authored early work in mechanistic interpretability at OpenAI and came away pessimistic, because neural networks appeared to fold into arbitrary tangled knots. years later, I started openai's first large-scale automated interpretability project, finding about 2% of neurons legible with the primitive tools we had
with modern agentic tools and a much closer look, the picture looks totally different. the vast majority in models up to trillions of parameters are legible, and their circuits beautiful. many famous examples of tangled neurons turned out to be misunderstood. The roadblocks I expected mostly aren't there. I now think ambitious interpretability will be solved by the time we need it most, and possibly quite soon, as automated scientists keep improving. it may be a bitter lesson for interpretability: the simple thing, at absurd scale, works
already-clean.goodfire.com/
Georg Polzer retweeted
"Europa przegrywa z Chinami, fabryki upadają"?
Oto twarde dane z gospodarki strefy euro:
1. Prawie 2/3 importu z Chin to zaledwie 5 branż (chemia, auta, proste maszyny).
2. W tym samym czasie unijny przemysł farmaceutyczny, optyczny i elektronika specjalistyczna notują rekordowe wzrosty.
Efekt? Zatrudnienie i realna wartość dodana w przemyśle UE w ciągu dekady... wzrosły.
3. Tani wsad z Chin obniża koszty europejskim fabrykom (badanie EBC: +0,6 p.p. do rocznego wzrostu produkcji).
4. To Chiny są w ponad 80% uzależnione od UE w 41 strategicznych łańcuchach dostaw (od litografii ASML i optyki Zeissa po medycynę).
Chiny nie niszczą europejskiego przemysłu ale wymuszają 'twórczą destrukcję' i ucieczkę w segmenty najwyższych marż.
Prawdziwym problemem Europy nie jest Pekin, tylko leżący w szufladzie raport Draghiego (wdrożono ledwie 15% zaleceń).
Georg Polzer retweeted
What’s the evidence on rent control?
I charted the findings from 112 studies:
Great for rent-controlled tenants ✅
But:
Pushes up rents for other people ❌
Pushes down new housing construction ❌
Pushes down building quality ❌
Georg Polzer retweeted
Small bird, fast wings, Kolibri is here.
78B parameters. 3.46B active. Up to 1M tokens of context. Built in Europe.
Now the weights are yours. Run it on your own hardware, under Apache 2.0.
Georg Polzer retweeted
Mustafa Suleyman's whole piece criticizing Anthropic, and the way it's imbuing Claude with some sense of self-hood is really worth reading IMO mustafa-suleyman.ai/a-warnin…
Wann endlich in Deutschland, @bundeskanzler?
Oggi il Parlamento ha approvato in via definitiva la legge sul nucleare.
Dopo quasi quarant'anni, l'Italia torna ad avere un quadro di regole per produrre energia nucleare. Una scelta coraggiosa e di buon senso.
Oggi importiamo elettricità prodotta dalle centrali nucleari di nazioni vicine, ma non possiamo produrla noi. Questa legge serve a cambiare le cose.
Cosa significa per famiglie e imprese:
• Più sicurezza energetica: meno dipendenza dall'estero e meno esposizione alle crisi internazionali che abbiamo pagato in bolletta.
• Energia stabile e a basse emissioni, che lavora insieme a tutte le altre, a partire dalle rinnovabili.
• Una risposta concreta alla domanda di elettricità che crescerà con data center e intelligenza artificiale.
Parliamo di tecnologie di nuova generazione, non delle vecchie centrali.
Ora il Governo scriverà le norme attuative su sicurezza, autorizzazioni, gestione dei rifiuti e rapporto con i territori.
Era un impegno preso con gli italiani. Un altro impegno che abbiamo mantenuto 🇮🇹
Georg Polzer retweeted
ASML: "We are not selling anything in Europe at all. That is because Europe is not investing, and no chip factories are being built here". nltimes.nl/2026/09/22/asml-c…
Georg Polzer retweeted
Ali Ghodsi: “There’s no agentic work that’s automated the whole enterprise. That has just not happened.”
“I think that the real reason, if you actually look at it, is the models are smart enough, but they just don’t have the context that exists inside of any organization.”
“We don’t need a smarter model that can actually solve Navier-Stokes or conjectures or do better on Humanity’s Last Exam. We need it to just go from 60 to 70%.”
Co-sign. We’re very early on getting the most out of context.
Brilliant conversation @alighodsi @martin_casado
Databricks' @alighodsi on AI risk and adoption:
Ali isn't losing sleep over the existential risk debate.
He says a number of conditions would all have to be true simultaneously to enable an actual runaway takeoff scenario, and currently several opposite conditions exist.
Each frontier training run requires significantly more resources. Power, GPUs, engineers - and some attempts fail, burning up huge piles of money with them. Until that reverses, he doesn't see the self-improving loop happening.
Cyber is what he's watching most closely and where he anticipates real impact. Most orgs are not equipped for the coming change in agentic capabilities. The time between a vulnerability being published and being weaponized has collapsed from years to hours.
On adoption, he believes most companies don't need a smarter model. The models are already smart enough. The gap is context they don't absorb - the things an employee who's worked at a company for five years learned by osmosis.
If the frontier stopped advancing today, he thinks it wouldn't meaningfully change the value most are extracting from AI anyway.
In conversation with a16z's Martin Casado and Sarah Wang:
00:00 Intro
00:48 Why Ali places the AI risk near zero
05:05 The word "pacing" was a mistake
10:50 What 10k agents and $100m can do
12:20 What would change his mind on AI risk
14:20 More GPUs, more ways to fail
18:05 US export controls on PlayStations
20:10 The damage everyone expected by now
24:30 Public vulnerabilities weaponized in hours
30:15 Why labs can't grade each other
37:15 Why most of RSI isn't actually RSI
40:05 Why nobody really needs a smarter model
41:50 The AI use cases nobody argues about
47:30 Google Search solved this 25 years ago
50:55 Nobody has privileged knowledge now
55:10 Same model, new harness, 2x cost
58:15 Open source: 5% of spend, 60% of tokens
1:05:30 90% of new databases are created by agents
YouTube: youtu.be/GzEtpAKYRvE
@databricks @martin_casado @sarahdingwang
Kurze Anleitung zur Berlin Wahl am Sonntag:
🏡 Du willst eine große, günstige Wohnung? Dann muss mehr gebaut werden. Und das geht nur mit weniger Regeln zu Bauhöhe, Flächennutzung, Energieeffizienz etc. Und das gibt es nur mit der FDP. Enteignung wie von den Linken und Grünen gefordert verscheucht die letzten Menschen, die es noch wagen neue Wohnungen in Berlin zu bauen.
🔋Du willst günstigere Energiepreise? Dann müssen wir mehr Energie aus allen Quellen beziehen. Und das gibt es nur mit der FDP. Die viert-teuersten Stromkosten der Welt verdanken wir der Abschaltung der Atomkraftwerke durch die Grünen, SPD und CDU.
💼 Du willst einen gut bezahlten Job? Dann brauchen Unternehmen ebenso niedrigere Energiepreise, aber auch weniger bürokratische Berichtspflichten und niedrigere Steuern, damit mehr Geld für neue Mitarbeiter übrig ist. Das gibt es nur mit der FDP. Linke und SPD wollen noch mehr Steuern erheben.
🚢 Du willst weniger niedrig-qualifizierte Einwanderung? Dann muss die zu großzügige Sozialhilfe eingeschränkt werden für Menschen, die ohne Ausbildung und ohne Sprachkenntnisse nach Deutschland kommen. Und das gibt es nur mit der FDP. Fremdenfeindliche Gesetze wie von der AfD gefordert passen nicht zu Deutschland. Linke und SPD wollen derweil die Sozialhilfe weiter fließen lassen.
🏳️🌈 Du willst, dass Berlin die Hauptstadt der Freiheit bleibt? Dann müssen wir allen Geschäften erlauben auch Sonntags zu öffnen, alle Ämter müssen per App und in Englisch erreichbar sein und Gesetze für gleichgeschlechtliche Partnerschaften müssen geschützt werden. Das gibt es mit der FDP - nicht mit AfD und CDU.
🤖 Made with AI
Very impressive progress by OpenAI. At the same time, not sure I would hire a lawyer with 54% answer accuracy. Or am I missing something?
Georg Polzer retweeted
PETER THIEL CALLED IT.
The Antichrist wouldn’t build the doomsday machine.
This clip aged terrifyingly well.
Peter Thiel predicted in June, 26, 2025 exactly what is happening right now with Anthropic, Coxon and the AI-safety landscape.
“The way the Antichrist would take over the world is you talk about Armageddon non-stop, you talk about existential risk non-stop.”
The 'Antichrist' wouldn’t seize power by creating an AI apocalypse, but by CONVINCING everyone that the apocalypse was coming and then offering safety in exchange for CONTROL.
A must watch.
Georg Polzer retweeted
REMINDER: They need a credible off ramp from the hyper scaling narrative they’ve been selling for months. Safety concerns are an obvious way to justify the incoming pivot. They also justify taking the whole thing into a closed “Manhattan project” type setting at the government’s expense. This justifies the incoming lockdown.
As I predicted in August the scale narrative had run its course due to kimi. Hyper scaling wasn’t about genuine demand expectations. It was about winning the ai race by outspending and bankrupting your competitors. Kimi made that pointless.
This is no doubt the asymmetric information Bessent has been alluding to for weeks. There’s going to be a helluva lot of liquidity freed by this move. It’s all going to go flooding into USTs. Happy D day bond guys.
👇
Great observation from Tracy below. But I’ve annotated the chart as I think a lot of people still don’t understand that it was Deepseek that triggered this acute phase of hyper scaling.
By going open weight Deepseek commoditised AI ensuring the “there can be only one” race had no choice but to turn to capex spend instead.
It’s been a simple “who has the ways and means to moat up most expansively?” ever since. If you’re confused by the economics, it’s because the economics aren’t supposed to make sense. The irrationality of the infrastructure spend is the logic. We’re in the world of Highlander.
That means you win by forcing everyone else to go bankrupt. Potentially even yourself (safe in the knowledge that if you do Uncle Sam still inherits the legacy infrastructure.)
In that sense it’s no different from the USSR diverting the nation’s entire consumer budget into vast steel plants that no one else could ever afford to match on cost.
But if loss leading your way to AI domination through control of compute was the plan, last month’s Kimi moonshot disrupted everything. It’s like beating Russian steel with the invention of a Star Trek replicator.
That’s why I’d be surprised if the pace of debt issuance continues on at the projected pace. If anything, Leopold’s blow up implies a pivot towards greater capital efficiency is incoming.
Alternatively this is when “the project” begins in earnest.
Either way, I’d bet on more secrecy and even more centralisation.
The only question now is whether the USG takes control or not. Judging by Anthropic’s previous spat over Pentagon access, this is the point where the statecraft is gonna get complicated.
👇
Georg Polzer retweeted
The Euro lives on German altruism, but - as Germany falls on hard times - that altruism is fading and means the future of the Euro will be increasingly up for debate in Germany. I talked about all this on a live stream a few weeks ago. You can watch here:
robinjbrooks.substack.com/p/…
Ein trauriger Abend für die FDP.
Es ist mir unerklärlich wie die objektiv besten Antworten zu den grössten Wähleranliegen keinen Anklang finden:
1) Lebenshaltungskosten: Steuern und Sozialabgaben runter (im Gegensatz zu Linke und SPD)
2) Migration: Abbau des Sozialstaats reduziert ganz natürlich Attraktivität für Einwanderer ohne Qualifikation und macht harte Restriktionen überflüssig (im Gegensatz zu AfD)
3) Energiekosten: alle Energiequellen sind gut, Hauptsache mehr davon (im Gegensatz zu den Grünen)
4) Wohnkosten: ungebremster Bau von mehr Wohnungen führen nachweislich zu niedrigeren Mieten - ohne Schutz von seltenen Fledermäusen und ohne Verkrustung durch Mietendeckel etc (im Gegensatz zu Linken, SPD und Grünen)
5) Arbeitsplätze: mehr Wachstum dank ungebremstem Ausbau von Rechenzentren, keine Regulation von KI, flexiblere Anstellungsverhältnisse (im Gegensatz zu Grünen, SPD und Linke)
6) Demographie: Erhöhung des Rentenalters und Aktienrente (im Gegensatz zu Linken)
Mit der CDU ist die FDP bei vielen dieser Themen in Übereinstimmung - aber die FDP bietet zwei entscheidende Vorteile: Unabhängig von jeglicher Religiosität/Christentum und Offenheit für jegliche Familienmodelle und Geschlechterrollen.
Die Herausforderung der FDP: sie ist mit den oben genannten Positionen unbequem und verlangt dem Wähler deutlich mehr eigene Initiative und Mut ab, als die anderen Parteien.
Ich glaube dennoch fest daran, dass die FDP dank ihrer thematisch starken Substanz zurückkommt. Totgesagte leben länger!