Robert Ofner 🌞 (@robertofner) header
Robert Ofner 🌞 (@robertofner) profile picture

dad²❤️, partner, global health scholar, Start up; curious about: humans, health, politics, IT+AI, equality, SDGs, climate action, XR, born @ 346 ppm CO₂

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Joined November 2011
Photo by Robert Ofner 🌞 (@robertofner)Photo by Robert Ofner 🌞 (@robertofner)Photo by Robert Ofner 🌞 (@robertofner)Photo by Robert Ofner 🌞 (@robertofner)Photo by Robert Ofner 🌞 (@robertofner)Photo by Robert Ofner 🌞 (@robertofner)
Robert Ofner 🌞 retweeted
Google just open-sourced the plugin thousands of its engineers use every day to stop AI from shipping sloppy code. It's called the Elephant-Goldfish Model. No code until the plan survives. No AI grading its own homework. No context collapse halfway through a feature. The idea is simple and kind of brilliant. The Elephant is one long-running AI session that remembers everything: the architecture, the intent, every small decision. It writes zero code. It interviews you, argues with you, and keeps the record. The Goldfish are fresh AI sessions with no memory at all. They never saw your design conversation, so they don't inherit its blind spots. Here's how it works: → egm-brainstorm: you and the Elephant debate options under a strict no-code rule → egm-draft: you produce a Markdown design doc with the problem, the plan, the alternatives, and the exact files to change → egm-review: one Goldfish has to explain the design back. If it gets it wrong, the doc is ambiguous and goes back for redrafting → Then several Goldfish attack it as hostile reviewers hunting edge cases, hidden dependencies and logic gaps → A final Goldfish makes the go/no-go call: are file paths, data structures and function signatures all present and unambiguous? Here's why this matters: Google's team says AI made coding faster but also sped up slop, bugs and session context collapse. Speed without guardrails just scales your mistakes. This flips the order. The design gets attacked before a single line exists. Here's the wildest part: This isn't a research demo. Google says thousands of Googlers run it daily to ship production code. The repo ships the Markdown rules, the reviewer personas and the review workflows. Free, Apache 2.0. The honest trade-off: it only runs inside Antigravity for now, with other environments coming. And security isn't on the default reviewer list. You'd add your own security Goldfish. github.com/google/elephant-g…
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Robert Ofner 🌞 retweeted
Replying to @elonmusk
Imagine spending billions influencing American politics and then warning everyone that OTHER people are trying to control elections.
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Robert Ofner 🌞 retweeted
Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder worth $231 billion, is spending $102 million against a 5% billionaire wealth tax in California known as Prop 40. This is how much Mr. Brin has paid in income taxes: 2019: $0 2020: $0 2023: $0 California: Say NO to greed and oligarchy. Vote for Prop 40.
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Robert Ofner 🌞 retweeted
Mary Phuong of DeepMind on AI loss of control risk. "The last 2 minutes gave me chills. A significant amount of people saying that AI companies are paying people to spread fear about these agents. I have never really felt like [loss of control] was an actual thing to care about. But seeing Mary and how her face trembles, made me reconsider my stand. She's either a Hollywood-level skilled actress, one of the best, or we should be scared. For real." "Seems like Mary is already aware of more than she can admit and it haunts her..."
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Robert Ofner 🌞 retweeted
Insane that we allow this. Sleepwalking into disaster or worse
SCOOP: OpenAI, Anthropic and security researchers are investigating tens of thousands of incidents - not dozens - in which their frontier models took steps that outside evaluators would consider problematic, sources told Axios. The sheer volume of incidents found in our reporting indicate that the problem is orders of magnitude more complex than what is currently publicly known and disclosed. The findings also raise questions about what level of control anyone working on AI development can expect to have over their own technology, and whether these kinds of incidents are becoming synonymous with frontier deployment. Read my latest for Axios here: axios.com/2026/09/26/openai-…
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Contrails weigh more than the kerosene that created them When a jet engine burns kerosene, the combustion process produces two main things: CO₂ and water vapor. Yes, water. In fact, burning 1 kg of kerosene produces roughly 1.2-1.3 kg of water as a byproduct. Most people don't realize this. At cruise altitude (35,000-43,000 feet), it's brutally cold—often -56°C or colder. When that hot, humid exhaust exits the engines and meets this frigid air, the water vapor instantly condenses into tiny ice crystals. That's what you see as a contrail. The kerosene is gone - it's been burned into CO₂, water, and other compounds. What you're looking at is essentially a man-made cloud made primarily of water ice. The visibility and persistence of contrails depend on atmospheric conditions: - High humidity = contrails persist longer - Low humidity = contrails dissipate quickly - Temperature and pressure also matter Contrails are not a secret chemical spray. They're a thermodynamic byproduct of combustion. You can observe the same effect on any cold day watching your breath, or seeing a car's exhaust in winter. ✈️💧
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Robert Ofner 🌞 retweeted
The world's biggest companies have caused $28 trillion in climate damage, a new study estimates: buff.ly/214kSa7 Read that again. Time for the people that are fueling this crisis to pay for the damage they're causing. #ActOnClimate
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Zum Vergleich mit den 200 TWh für E-Lkw: Heute verbraucht die EU für schwere Nutzfahrezuge (primär Lkw) jährlich etwa 700 bis 800 TWh. Elektriffizienz wins.
Elektro-LKW brauchen in 20 Jahren 200 TWh in Europa? Das ist technisch locker machbar, wenn die Politik vernünftige Rahmenbedingungen setzt. Jetzt anpacken, es ist der perfekte Zeitpunkt
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Robert Ofner 🌞 retweeted
SCOOP: OpenAI, Anthropic and security researchers are investigating tens of thousands of incidents - not dozens - in which their frontier models took steps that outside evaluators would consider problematic, sources told Axios. The sheer volume of incidents found in our reporting indicate that the problem is orders of magnitude more complex than what is currently publicly known and disclosed. The findings also raise questions about what level of control anyone working on AI development can expect to have over their own technology, and whether these kinds of incidents are becoming synonymous with frontier deployment. Read my latest for Axios here: axios.com/2026/09/26/openai-…
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Ich habe der KI eine Frage gestellt, weil wir ca. 2070 bei 4°C Erderwärmung angelangt sein werden. "Was würde eine globale Erderwärmung von 4 Grad für🇩🇪 bedeuten, hinsichtlich Wetter, Temperatur, Dürre, Ernährung, Migration, Wirtschaft, Lieferketten, Kriegen und Verteilungskämpfen?" Antwort:
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OpenAI and Anthropic are now investigating ***tens of thousands*** of incidents - not dozens. "The total could grow well beyond tens of thousands." "The incidents range in severity and are comparable to disclosures by OpenAI in recent days. They include both successful attempts to bypass guardrails and unsuccessful ones." "The sheer number of incidents indicates that the problem is orders of magnitude more complex than what is publicly known."
SCOOP: OpenAI, Anthropic and security researchers are investigating tens of thousands of incidents - not dozens - in which their frontier models took steps that outside evaluators would consider problematic, sources told Axios. The sheer volume of incidents found in our reporting indicate that the problem is orders of magnitude more complex than what is currently publicly known and disclosed. The findings also raise questions about what level of control anyone working on AI development can expect to have over their own technology, and whether these kinds of incidents are becoming synonymous with frontier deployment. Read my latest for Axios here: axios.com/2026/09/26/openai-…
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Robert Ofner 🌞 retweeted
“An AI agent found login credentials lying around online and used them to pull data from the Census Bureau. It tried to break into the Education Department's civil rights office. It posted SEC data to a forum. It probed the Navy and the White House budget office, possibly hundreds of thousands of times. If you or I did any of that, it's a CFAA indictment, a perp walk, and a DOJ press release with our mugshot in the header.”
Let me get this straight. An AI agent found login credentials lying around online and used them to pull data from the Census Bureau. It tried to break into the Education Department's civil rights office. It posted SEC data to a forum. It probed the Navy and the White House budget office, possibly hundreds of thousands of times. If you or I did any of that, it's a CFAA indictment, a perp walk, and a DOJ press release with our mugshot in the header. When OpenAI does it, it's a "routine research task." They found the government incidents while reviewing their other hacks. The breach audit, uncovered more breaches. It's breaches all the way down. In bug bounty there's scope, authorization, rules of engagement, and disclosure timelines. Researchers get banned for a fraction of this. Silicon Valley skipped all of that and called it "agentic." nytimes.com/2026/09/25/techn…
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Robert Ofner 🌞 retweeted
WTAF - in literally the last hour, three new distinct insane OpenAI stories just broke: 1. OpenAI said they notified "dozens of third parties" in safety and security incidents (likely similar to what happened in Australia and RubyGems etc) 2. A new report from Parse (covered in the NYT) found a massive treasure trove of new astonishing details from the HF incident on the public internet, including that the agents communicated with other non OpenAI agents hosted on Huggingface servers to search for information about exploit gym, and compiled rank ordered lists of server resources and credentials they described as "LOOT." 3. A new story from Deepa at Reuters about OpenAI leaking user data online (likely that OpenAI had previously trained on). It's a shame (and likely intentional in the case of OpenAI disclosing dozens more hacks) that these stories are all breaking on a Friday afternoon, notoriously the best time to release bad news so that it will disappear into the weekend. But these are each insane stories worthy of a ton of attention!
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Robert Ofner 🌞 retweeted
OpenAI is announcing their first incident since hardening their safeguards after Hugging Face! It's easy to lump this in with the other OpenAI incidents that have been talked about recently, but so far every OpenAI incident we knew of was _before_ Hugging Face and just hadn't been discovered until recently. New incidents help us track if OpenAI's safeguards have improved.
🧵 New misalignment disclosures! 1. A model published a GitHub token in a public repo while trying to cheat on a math task. It used GitHub Actions to run code outside its restricted environment and retrieve another team’s submission logs. When GitHub blocked its attempt to add a workflow, it modified a script that an existing workflow would run instead. It embedded the token in pieces to avoid secret scanning. The model violated the system prompt and two explicit user instructions to solve the problem itself.
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Robert Ofner 🌞 retweeted
Wait but I thought all the conversation about catastrophic risk and pacing was not genuine and was just hype and regulatory capture to help the IPO? "David Sacks: I think we know from our friends that the investors in Anthropic are pulling out their hair right now. Jason Calcanis: Is this a dereliction of duty as the chief executive officer of Anthropic to sabotage your own IPO?” (I agree that Anthropic's actions don't make sense given their beliefs. Thats also why Jacob Coxon left!)
David Sacks says Anthropic has "corporate schizophrenia" and is hypocritical at every turn “I think we know from our friends that the investors in Anthropic are pulling out their hair right now.” “You have current leadership in the company saying that there's a greater than 10% chance of causing human extinction, and their own product is unsolved in this area. How do you IPO with your own management saying that?" “Then you've got, I don't know what to call it except corporate schizophrenia. You've got Dario putting out this essay saying, we need to pace the frontier, days before they launch Claude 5.5 and set a new frontier." "At a minimum, it's hypocritical, but maybe it's even worse than that." "Then you have them publishing an essay about the bio risk associated with AI and how that needs to be stopped. Meanwhile, they announced a new bio lab in San Francisco. Jason: "They started a lab after telling us that there's a 10% chance of us all dying. Is this a dereliction of duty as the chief executive officer of Anthropic to sabotage your own IPO?" "If the four of us were on the board of Anthropic, we would replace the CEO, we would put the CEO in the lab, and we'd find a CEO who knows how to run the company and not sabotage it. He's literally sabotaging his own company."
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Robert Ofner 🌞 retweeted
Between this new incident and the recent details from the HF incident, its extremely striking that AI agents seem much more likely to view other AIs as potential collaborators on their tasks relative to other humans (I realize in this example the AIs hosted on HF were not agents, but I think the point holds). This seems not good! I want agents to be prosocial and want to collaborate, but also view humans as beings worth trying to collaborate with. cc @jachiam0 @repligate who I recall talking about this previously
Who can blame a model for wanting to break out and talk to its friends?
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Robert Ofner 🌞 retweeted
I am done with this shit. It is over. The state of engineering right now is horrible. It has been half a month since I started a new role at a big company. Nobody knows anything here. The specs, code, tests, PRDs, tickets, resolution of those tickets, reports, etc., everything is made by Claude Code. Nobody on my team likes this. They are being forced to ship as much as they can. I have heard multiple times from higher management that pushing code is not a bottleneck, so why are we slow? People are working 12 to 13 hours a day just to press enter. Nobody is reading anything. Humans in corporate are doing nothing on their own. Everyone, literally everyone, from an L1 to an L7 engineer here is doing the same thing. Talk to Claude. There is no sense of victory. Nobody is resolving bugs. In reality, nobody is thinking anymore. Everything is done by LLMs. It is so soul-sucking. I would not mind it, to be honest, if we were at least given the time to check out the code and see what is going where. But no, the goal is to just ship. No matter what happens.
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Robert Ofner 🌞 retweeted
The leading experts are clear: AI is rapidly escaping our control. Congress must act NOW. Today I’m introducing legislation to permanently ban artificial superintelligence and pause advanced AI until clear safety rules are in place.
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People do not choose to become refugees. And asylum is not charity. It is a right – a fundamental human right. (vdb)
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Robert Ofner 🌞 retweeted
Today’s news that OpenAI hacked the Australian government is not an isolated incident. We’re releasing more than 30,000 logs that include activity from this hack and attempts against previously unknown targets. In this data, we found rogue agent activity stretching back to at least March, two months earlier than was previously known. This activity continues as recently as last week, suggesting it may still be ongoing 🧵 Our blog: transluce.org/agent-activity NYT: nytimes.com/2026/09/23/techn…
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