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Bern
Joined April 2016
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1/ Nach zwei Boomjahren leider 2024 herber Rückschlag bei den Wärmepumpen Installationen in der Schweiz, wie seit Kurzem im FWS Q4-Reporting publiziert und heute in der Sonntagszeitung berichtet. Es wurden 30'811 Wärmepumpen zur Gebäudebeheizung installiert. Das sind 29% weniger als im Vorjahr (43'490).
Matthias Meier retweeted
Michael Pollan reveals how the introduction of caffeine completely changed human history and consciousness.
"Before caffeine, it was a very different world and a very different consciousness. People were drunk a lot of the time, buzzed almost all of the time because it was safer than water"
"Water was really how you got diseases. If you fermented things, even low alcohol, it killed a lot of the microbes. So people, even kids, drank hard cider for breakfast"
"Tea, chocolate, and coffee all arrive in the same decade in England, and things start to change... no one ate or drank boiling water or hot beverages before"
"Boiling it made it much safer. This gave this incredible public health boost to these places, and then you have the drug that fosters a kind of more linear, rational, focused way of thinking"
"People in the 1600s started writing about it saying, 'Wow, we have this new civil and sober drink that we can use.' And that, I think, makes possible things like the Industrial Revolution"
Matthias Meier retweeted
FIELDS MEDALIST TESTED IF HE'S OBSOLETE
timothy gowers took an open problem from a new paper on additive combinatorics and handed it to chatgpt 5.5 pro.
no fancy prompts. no setup. just the problem statement.
the model thought for 17 minutes. then wrote a complete latex preprint in two.
it took a bound that had been exponential for decades and brought it down to polynomial. the construction was something nobody had tried on this class of problems before.
gowers asked isaac rajagopal to review the work. rajagopal wrote the paper the model was improving on.
his verdict: the key idea is "completely original" and "quite ingenious." "the sort of idea i would be very proud to come up with after a week or two of pondering."
the model spent 17 minutes on it.
then gowers pushed further. gave it the harder generalized version. under an hour, a stronger result. exponential to polynomial again.
gowers on his own mathematical contribution to the whole thing: "zero. i didn't even do anything clever with the prompts."
the result is a solid chapter in a combinatorics phd. publishable mathematics that a graduate student would spend months producing.
a fields medalist. one of the best combinatorialists alive. sitting there copy-pasting prompts while a model does doctoral-level research in front of him.
his conclusion: "the lower bound for contributing to mathematics will now be to prove something that llms can't prove."
he gives the profession until 2029 before it's "transformed out of all recognition."
seventeen minutes. zero human math. a result that takes months by hand.
this was may 2026. five months ago. the model that did it is already outdated.
link to the paper in the comments
Matthias Meier retweeted
$GOOG is down 7% after Search revenue growth of 12%, below the Street’s 15% estimate. Search had been beating estimates since March of 2025.
If this was a clean miss with no one-time factors, it will likely restart fears that generative AI and increasingly personalized bots will nibble away at growth.
Look for comments on the call about how they plan to navigate this upcoming wave.
Matthias Meier retweeted
I'm also getting more concerned about $AMZN because personalized bots will make it easy to find just what you're looking for, making them a logical starting point for anything we buy.
Amazon wins for three reasons: 1. Find what you want, 2. Speed, 3. Trust. Number 1 will increasingly be under attack.
Early data says this is happening, with Zuck's comment last week that Muse's main use case is commerce.
Global daily bot usage is around 20m. I bet it's 2B in three years.
I'm getting more concerned about $GOOG because they need an answer to personalized bots.
Three key topics for earnings tonight:
1. Cloud growth outlook. Expect 92% growth in September and 95% in December. I think they guide to a slight step-up in growth in December.
2. Capex. Street at $201B in CY26 and $312B in CY27. I think that's the right number.
3. How do they win with personalized bots? Can Google have an AI Overview and AI Mode encore to direct search traffic into personalized bot usage?
Matthias Meier retweeted
Auf mich hört ja keiner. Ausser Apple!
Endlich ein Touchscreen im Macbook!
Und ich habe es schon ausprobiert…
Matthias Meier retweeted
Soon we will do the same with every disease
OpenAI used thousands of AI agents to investigate a Parkinson like neurodegenerative disease, compressing months of scientific research into just 32 minutes.
The agents analyzed data from millions of brain cells, explored hundreds of scientific references, and uncovered a potential connection between a specific gene, cholesterol regulation, and neurodegeneration.
Human experts preferred the multi-agent research reports 75% of the time over those produced by a single AI agent.
Matthias Meier retweeted
#USelec25
Trump baut die Demokratie im Rekordtempo ab – und übertrifft damit einen weltweiten Trend
tagesanzeiger.ch/midterms-20…
Matthias Meier retweeted
The biggest mistake tourists make in Japan is dragging a fifty-pound suitcase up and down subway stairs.
Watch how Japanese travelers board the bullet train. They walk on with a cup of green tea, a small shoulder bag, and both hands free.
Where is their luggage? It is already in the next city, waiting for them.
In Japan, the system is called Takkyubin, recognizable everywhere by a logo of a mother black cat carrying her kitten gently in her mouth.
When you check out of your hotel in Tokyo at eight in the morning, you hand your heavy suitcase to the front desk, fill out a tiny slip, and pay about twenty dollars. You can even send it straight from the corner convenience store.
Then you spend the entire day wandering through mountain temples or eating street food with nothing on your back.
When you walk into your traditional inn in Kyoto that evening, your suitcase is already standing neatly in your room, wiped clean, with the handle turned toward you.
In fifty years of handling millions of bags a year, lost luggage is virtually unheard of.
A society runs smoothly when you can hand your belongings to a stranger at a convenience store and know they will beat you to your hotel.
Matthias Meier retweeted
Here’s one example of how gutting OpenAI’s release of hundreds of solved math problems was for mathematicians. A powerful piece from Cornell math professor @stevenstrogatz theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/1…
Matthias Meier retweeted
Rumors I’ve been hearing. I’ll start with OpenAI, then Anthropic.
OpenAI: The internal model’s reasoning jump comes from more aggressive RL, including training in games and simulated environments. Strategies learned there transfer to research mathematics and other fields. Navier–Stokes and ETH show the scale of the improvement. The clue is in the Synthetic RL hiring: self-play, simulators, and synthetic feedback.
Anthropic: Same direction with its internal Claude model. It’s trained on long, difficult tasks in demanding environments, and the reasoning skills transfer to other fields. Its ETH result shows how far the improvement has gone. The earlier Universes listing and the RL hiring around mathematical reasoning align with that.
Musk’s Digital Optimus hiring explicitly calls for measuring transfer from games into general computer use. That’s why his game-playing AI push matters: games develop abilities that work far beyond the games themselves.
The interesting part is where those abilities show up. Each lab’s internal model applies reasoning developed through interactive training to mathematical problems that had resisted decades of work.
Matthias Meier retweeted
ANTHROPIC MAY BE BUILDING THE FIRST AI RETIREMENT HOME
In today's newsletter, I wrote about the Anthropic S-1 and what I thought was the most interesting risk factor -- this idea that more and more of their compute may go to keeping obsolete models alive.
Matthias Meier retweeted
The Economist states that 🇸🇦Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) is facing an “annus horribilis” as three of his core, long-term strategic gambles fail simultaneously: his military campaign against the Houthis, his economic transformation via Vision 2030, and his reliance on 🇺🇸Donald Trump as a reliable ally.
MBS’s decade-old gamble that he could easily defeat the Houthi movement in 🇾🇪Yemen has severely backfired. The Houthis have launched devastating drone and missile attacks directly into Saudi Arabia, targeting infrastructure including Riyadh’s International Airport, which was effectively shut down following deadly strikes.
A truce brokered in 2022 broke down completely during the summer of 2026, exacerbated by broader regional conflicts involving US and 🇮🇷Iran.
The Houthis have seized additional territory, leaving Riyadh with only poor alternatives: enter a bloody ground war, continue ineffective air strikes, or sign a deal that permanently cements Houthi rule on their border.
The economic crisis amid the Iran war is stalling MBS’s so called “Vision 2030” which was supposed to pivot the Saudi economy away from oil.
While IMF initially projected the Saudi economy to grow by 4% in 2026, it is now expected to contract by 3.3%.
Another MBS idea for “Davos in the Desert” was cancelled after Western executives grew nervous over Houthi threats and governments issued travel warnings.
Annual foreign direct investment (FDI) has plummeted to roughly 1/3 of MBS’s $100 billion target. Megaprojects are being shelved as public finances face immense strain, and local wages are failing to keep pace with soaring inflation.
But probably the most significant of all is the failed bet on Donald Trump. MBS heavily aligned Saudi security and diplomatic strategy with the Trump Administration, investing heavily in US and executing controversial financial deals with the former first family to buy influence.
However, this partnership has failed to yield the ironclad security umbrella Saudi Arabia expected. Instead, US confrontations with Iran have escalated the regional proxy warfare, leaving the Kingdom highly vulnerable and exposed without an adequate American protection.
Is the unraveling of these interconnected MBS bets culminating in a severe geopolitical and financial crisis for Saudi Arabia:
A) Yes;
B) No?
Matthias Meier retweeted
BREAKING: Anthropic reveals it is developing its own experimental drugs using Claude, targeting rare childhood diseases & various cancers.
Matthias Meier retweeted
Ukrainian attack drones successfully struck Russia’s NAK Azot chemical plant in Tula Oblast tonight, setting it ablaze.
The plant was a major producer of nitrate precursors used in Russian explosives manufacturing.
Matthias Meier retweeted
'It's offensively cheap': How #solar power is quietly becoming bigger than #nuclear bbc.com/future/article/20261… via @BBC_Future
