Brendan M. O'Connell (@oconnell__) header
Brendan M. O'Connell (@oconnell__) profile picture

A collection of molecules temporarily hanging out together // Head of RL Environments @ Handshake AI

Brooklyn, NY
Joined December 2017
Photo by Brendan M. O'Connell (@oconnell__)Photo by Brendan M. O'Connell (@oconnell__)Photo by Brendan M. O'Connell (@oconnell__)Photo by Brendan M. O'Connell (@oconnell__)Photo by Brendan M. O'Connell (@oconnell__)Photo by Brendan M. O'Connell (@oconnell__)Photo by Brendan M. O'Connell (@oconnell__)Photo by Brendan M. O'Connell (@oconnell__)Photo by Brendan M. O'Connell (@oconnell__)Photo by Brendan M. O'Connell (@oconnell__)
Brendan M. O'Connell retweeted
Congratulations to the team at @thinkymachines for their release of Inkling 2 Small! We’re excited to see what’s next. 👀
Introducing Inkling 2 Small. Scoring 31 on the AA Intelligence Index, it's a big jump over its predecessor. Inkling 2 Small is available for fine-tuning and inference on Tinker today, with full weight release planned soon. thinkingmachines.ai/news/ink…
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Brendan M. O'Connell retweeted
Is Opus 5.5 a good Vision-Language Model? We ran it on ATLAS Visual Life Sciences (VIALS), 161 visual interpretation tasks from professional life sciences workflows. It refused 15% of requests, but it (and GPT-6 Astra) still mark a major jump in VLMs for real scientific work.
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Brendan M. O'Connell retweeted
SEPT ’26: HUMANS STILL VERY MUCH HAVE JOBS. AI isn't even close to meeting the standard required of the most junior professionals in banking, advisory, and private equity today. ATLAS Finance agents must navigate complexity like a human does: "Johnny you just got staffed - check your email." Human: 100%. Best AI: 12%. Agents have access to data rooms, email, chat, calendars, docs, notes, Excel, etc. Our real finance professionals pushed the realism frontier further by building dozens of coworker and client personas that introduce ambiguity, (controlled) contradictions, and real-time updates that must be adjudicated to successfully complete the client-ready deliverable. We gave 11 frontier models 100 expert-level tasks that each take humans 15–30 hours. On Wall Street there's a saying, "If it's 95% right, it's 100% wrong." Autonomous knowledge work outside software still has a very long way to go.
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Brendan M. O'Connell retweeted
Fleet’s reported run rate went from ~$1M to $63M in six months. Mercor’s went from ~$500M to $2B in under a year. There aren’t many AI markets growing this fast. But the product also expires unusually fast. Labs moved from RLHF to expert SFT to RL environments, and are now looking for real company workflows. A vendor can be growing 50x and still be late to the next category. @patrick_tianyi and I spent the past few months talking to founders, researchers, and buyers about where the money is going, including a part of the market that has barely been written about in English: China’s new research-led data companies. Here’s what we learned ↓
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Brendan M. O'Connell retweeted
AI data factories like Handshake, Scale, Surge, and Mercor have a big role to play in the advancement of AI at the frontier and in the enterprise. This is my full thesis.
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Brendan M. O'Connell retweeted
Introducing Patch Radius. Spark a chain reaction of climate impact throughout your network of clients, portfolio companies, or supply chain. patch.io/radius
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Brendan M. O'Connell retweeted
Our ETHmissions panel yesterday was fantastic and informative. Many thanks to our brilliant guests @UliGall from CCRI and @oconnell__ from @usepatch!! ...Unfortunately, the link I shared didn't work for many 😭 apologies Luckily, it was recorded: here's the link to it
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Brendan M. O'Connell retweeted
wow. it would cost $10T to convert the US to a 100% carbon-free grid with 100% uptime, no new tech needed. it'd pay itself back in 5 years, create 5M jobs (net), prevent 50k deaths/year, and save $700B/year in healthcare, and use a third less land pv-magazine.com/2021/12/08/g…
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Brendan M. O'Connell retweeted
Crystal Mason, Black woman in Texas, gets 5 years in prison for casting provisional ballot on supervised release when didn’t realize ineligible & vote wasn’t even counted Kyle Rittenhouse crossed state lines to murder two people with AR-15 & is found not guilty
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Brendan M. O'Connell retweeted
We partnered with the #decarbonization experts at @usepatch to provide investors with a #sustainable way to invest in #crypto. ♻️Carbon emissions linked to an investment will be offset to target net zero carbon output. Explore how: purposeinvest.com/crypto/kno…
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Happy #IndigenousPeoplesDay Reminder that the US Army, sanctioned the near extinction of Bison in order to destroy the livelihoods of Indigenous peoples' in the midwest. Bison wasn't just a food source their bones were also used for tools, hides, clothing, and shelter.
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Brendan M. O'Connell retweeted
Marx famously advocated for 3.5 trillion dollars of social spending over 10 years
The $3.5 trillion Biden plan isn’t socialism, it’s marxism
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Brendan M. O'Connell retweeted
NFTs can be created, shared, and transacted in an environmentally-friendly way. We know because, it's what we do. If you're curious about how we're using Patch to minimize our carbon footprint, you can read about it here: palm.io/studio/can-nfts-actu…
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Brendan M. O'Connell retweeted
bees live for less than 40 days, during which they visit at least 1000 flowers, producing less than a teaspoon of honey. for us it’s just one teaspoon of honey, for the bee its a lifetime’s work. we appreciate you, bees 🐝
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Brendan M. O'Connell retweeted
Great write-up by @nbt. Patch is building infrastructure at the nexus of climate and crypto. If you're in the two-thirds of Fortune Global 500 companies with no formal climate target, DM us or visit patch.io to learn more.
As I think about the decade ahead, there are two waves that feel like mobile did just over a decade ago: climate and crypto. New post highlights five reasons why. nbt.substack.com/p/climate-c…
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Brendan M. O'Connell retweeted
$DEAD is up today after the Visa news — sitting at 4.20 😏
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Brendan M. O'Connell retweeted
Welp, one of the biggest carbon offset projects is burning. The Colville IFM project represents over 14M tons of carbon offsets, or ~6% of all credits in the CA compliance market. So... how about those buffer pools?
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New mind-blowing piece by @memotv
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Brendan M. O'Connell retweeted
two days apart
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Brendan M. O'Connell retweeted
"We make it incredibly easy to programmatically remove any amount of CO2 from the atmosphere," - our CEO and co-founder @bspellacy in a recent @GreenBiz article by @BenSoltoff. Read more: bit.ly/3yvoB4R #ClimateChange #CarbonCrisis #NetZero
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