Ecosystem Architect | Head of Strategic Partnerships | Scaling the decentralized future at @Bip32Ventures
Paris, France
Joined September 2010
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Robin Maillard retweeted
Good timing?
I'm incredibly excited to announce the founding of the Mathematical AI safety Institute (MAISI) maisi.org/. AI safety needs more foundational theoretical development, and mathematicians have the skills and the mindset to help! MAISI is an independent institute with visiting positions ranging from 1 semester to 2 years. Our goal is to get mathematicians up to speed and working on research directions in AI safety as quickly as possible. There is important work to be done, and there is real progress to be made. YOU can help!
Applications are open now! MAISI is aiming to hire 10-30 mathematicians to join us in the Bay Area by January, and scale up to 30-100 for September 2027. If you're a mathematician interested in channeling your skills toward the most important problem of our time, please apply today! maisi.org/apply
Robin Maillard retweeted
Our thoughts are with those impacted by the devastating floods in Nepal and Tibet.🇳🇵
Ripple is donating $300,000 to @WCKitchen and @MercyCorps to support emergency meal distribution and water and sanitation efforts on the ground.
Most founders cannot structure deals for that scale.
Good reminder here that with rapidly accelerating AI progress, you should likely be building with a vision that contemplates at least a few orders of magnitude of capability improvement or token volume available to you.
The best opportunities right now are those where you can value to customers today with things that are barely only possible, but with a full mission that feels nearly impossible with today’s tech.
There are lots of products the require orders of magnitude more processing of data (and thus are barely economically viable ideas) or where model capabilities still are in their infancy relative to what’s needed to work. Best to be building for those scenarios.
Robin Maillard retweeted
While you’re innocently betting college football in your DraftKings account…
You can now bet on price of bitcoin in the next *20min* or September’s CPI report.
We’ve reached a level of degeneracy that’s hard to fathom.
Robin Maillard retweeted
Articles like this plus observations that aggregating over hw types could create a separate/independent credit cycle than the dynamics of the Nvidia driven one (c.f. @LukePiette) resemble the early days of the online ads market
If you were a big publisher (e.g. Conde Nast) you ran your own exchange and effectively supported credit to ad buyers who came direct to you. But then the remnant/secondary/non-publisher market grew and you found ad networks and demand side providers who aggregated remnant/secondary ad space selling people bundles that replicated the click through rate / false discovery rate of the primary publisher venues.
Eventually, the market turned into a barbell/bimodal structure with FB/Google/TikTok being one end of purchasing spectrum and a number of other public ad networks taking the rest. Given the recent DoJ frontrunning cases against Amazon and Google, however, combined with the much harder, collateralized credit needed for AI, you probably will have a different market structure for AI.
But there are definitely lessons from ads and crypto — especially in terms of who takes most of the value and who doesn’t (hint: how hard their technical solution was to implement doesn’t correspond with long term value capture)
Robin Maillard retweeted
Counterpoint: The companies that embrace full on tokenization of their capital and distribution in every way possible will have the lowest cost of capital on the planet, ceteris paribus.
This is the finance 101 point that all the AML/KYC fanboys and “companies need to know exactly who their shareholders are” arguers miss. Many smart people have been telling me for years that public company CEOs will never embrace full on bearer securities. My response: “what kind of CEO demands a higher cost of capital “?
Now, obviously we don’t want shady SPVs and a million different pass through exposure products with different rights that fragment liquidity.
But that only means the securities regulators that embrace the most pure but least restricted and most bearer issuance formats will attract the most companies who in turn seek the lowest cost of capital.
We happen to live in era of surging markets and abundant capital. But that won’t last forever, and if rates keep rising it’ll end sooner than many think. When that happens, a lot of CEOs will sing a very different tune about tokenization of their equity.
We’ve already seen the sovereign debt version of this switch with stablecoins, products smart people told me for years no government will allow, “because KYC”. Now the biggest government states clearly they see bearer like fiat instruments as a path to lower cost of borrow.
The same argument will come for privately issued securities in the form of equity and debt.
Cost of capital is the final arbiter of which infrastructure and which product wins.
Robinhood apparently is behind an effort related to “tokenized real-world assets including Stock Tokens” for AMC Entertainment (and supposedly 190+ other companies). They are not registered under U.S. securities laws !!!!!!
I find this practice to be contemptible, outrageous, disgusting, detestable, inexcusable, vile. How can it possibly be legal? We have no connection to this at all, and do not condone it in any way.
We immediately are going to have our outside securities counsel look into this.
docs.robinhood.com/rhj
Stock Tokens are not registered under U.S. securities laws and may not be offered, sold, or delivered, directly or indirectly, in the United States or to, or for the account or benefit of, U.S. persons. Offers and sales of Stock Tokens are subject to restrictions in other jurisdictions, including, without limitation, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland. A full list of the jurisdictions in which offers or sales are restricted or prohibited is available here: docs.robinhood.com/rhj
Robinhood Assets (Jersey) Limited is a private limited company incorporated in Jersey, with its registered address at First Floor, La Chasse Chambers, Ten La Chasse, St. Helier, JE2 4UE, Jersey. The Issuer is registered under the registration number 162428.
Stock Tokens have not been and will not be registered under the U.S. Securities Act of 1933, as amended from time to time (the "Securities Act") or with any securities regulatory authority of any state or other jurisdiction of the United States. Stock Tokens may not be offered, sold or delivered within the United States to, or for the account or benefit of U.S. Persons (as defined in Regulation S under the Securities Act ("Regulation S")), and (ii) may be offered, sold or otherwise delivered at any time only outside of the United States and to transferees that are not U.S. Persons (as defined in Regulation S)….
©2026 Robinhood Markets, Inc. All rights reserved.
Robin Maillard retweeted
Interesting.
National security, finance, and every aspect of life will soon be disrupted by self-taught masters of the leading AI models. Every country and individual should be prepared, writes Tyler Cowen. thefp.com/p/tyler-cowen-ai-m…
Robin Maillard retweeted
the new rule is
never mind that the US has the same forest cover as it did 100 years ago, despite tripling in population
if vacant, privately owned land, zoned for industrial development happens to have trees on it, those trees have to remain there forever! because some redditors said so.
Robin Maillard retweeted
OH: “Someone told me to Google ‘Fatcoin LLY.’ Do you know what this is? I just kept getting ads for GLP-1s for dogs after looking it up”
Robin Maillard retweeted
Behind the scenes of the RWA Summit,
@fintechfrank asked me to share this photo because he looks “tan and hot”
Robin Maillard retweeted
The other funny thing about people who complain “token holders aren’t actual shareholders!!” Is they clearly don’t understand how public US equities work.
The only true shareholder is the CSD, in this case a subsidiary of the DTCC.
The rest of us only get derivatives. True for me and you, true for the biggest hedge funds.
The heart of American capitalism is a government protected monopoly that increases risk and reduces both property rights and innovation.
Counterpoint: The companies that embrace full on tokenization of their capital and distribution in every way possible will have the lowest cost of capital on the planet, ceteris paribus.
This is the finance 101 point that all the AML/KYC fanboys and “companies need to know exactly who their shareholders are” arguers miss. Many smart people have been telling me for years that public company CEOs will never embrace full on bearer securities. My response: “what kind of CEO demands a higher cost of capital “?
Now, obviously we don’t want shady SPVs and a million different pass through exposure products with different rights that fragment liquidity.
But that only means the securities regulators that embrace the most pure but least restricted and most bearer issuance formats will attract the most companies who in turn seek the lowest cost of capital.
We happen to live in era of surging markets and abundant capital. But that won’t last forever, and if rates keep rising it’ll end sooner than many think. When that happens, a lot of CEOs will sing a very different tune about tokenization of their equity.
We’ve already seen the sovereign debt version of this switch with stablecoins, products smart people told me for years no government will allow, “because KYC”. Now the biggest government states clearly they see bearer like fiat instruments as a path to lower cost of borrow.
The same argument will come for privately issued securities in the form of equity and debt.
Cost of capital is the final arbiter of which infrastructure and which product wins.
Robin Maillard retweeted
Jumper was my first boss (and is [IMO] why Demis won a Nobel) — timing in science is not like a trade where you can be incontrovertibly correct
It is a venture bet where you don’t know when it pays off and you adjust resource usage accordingly
Treating it like a spreadsheet calculation like this tweet suggests only leads to stupid, moronic, and non-repeatable conclusions tbh
Looking at predictions like these, I think Demis Hassabis was absolutely right to pursue AI applications in science and mathematics, but he moved too early. He should have focused more on improving AI’s fundamental capabilities.
Another thought comes to mind: if AlphaFold was enough to earn a Nobel Prize, what awards might Astra and Mythos earn, and what breakthroughs might they achieve?
And haven’t we perhaps already built AGI at the level of a typical scientific or mathematical researcher—at least for the purposes of research in those fields?
Robin Maillard retweeted
$XRP and @FloridaGators.🐊
Soon.
Robin Maillard retweeted
Amazing!
AI has helped resolve an important question in statistics. In the area of multiple hypothesis testing, the goal of controlling the false discovery rate (FDR) has been introduced in a seminal paper by Benjamini and Hochberg (1995). They also introduced a method (the Benjamini-Hochberg or BH method) and proved it controls the FDR. This method has been widely adopted in modern high-throughput science, including in genomics, astronomy, economics, etc. The paper has has garnered more than 130,000 citations to date.
However Benjamini and Hochberg showed FDR control only when the data for the individual tests are *independent*. In practice, these data are often dependent; a good example is data on genetic variants due to linkage disequilibrium. Later work has focused on extending the validity of the BH procedure, e.g., to a form of positive dependence by Benjamini and Yekutieli (2001).
The question of when the BH procedure controls the FDR has remained open. Over the last twenty years, many authors, including Reiner-Benaim (2007), Kim and van de Wiel (2008), Benjamini (2010), Sarkar (2023), Sarkar and Zhang (2025), have conjectured that the BH procedure controls the FDR for two-sided tests using any correlated Gaussian data. These authors have presented both theoretical and empirical evidence supporting, but not directly showing, the conjecture.
With the help of AI (specifically GPT-5.6 Sol Pro), I have settled the question in the negative: The Benjamini-Hochberg procedure does *not* generally control the false discovery rate at the desired level for correlated two-sided Gaussian tests. This was done by exhibiting a Gaussian factor model for which, at a nominal level alpha=0.01, the false discovery rate is proved to be FDR>0.0104.
There is a lot of interesting commentary to be made:
1. This result should be of interest to everybody in the field of statistics. Emmanuel Candes of Stanford University once called the false discovery rate and the Benjamini-Hochberg procedure "one of the two most important developments in statistics after 1950" (the other being James-Stein shrinkage). The present conjecture is probably the most central question about FDR/BH that was unresolved to date.
2. GPT-5.6 one-shot the problem after 90 minutes of reasoning, whereas with 5.5 I was not able to solve it even after iterating with multiple parallel agents for perhaps 20 hours. So the capability improvement is quite real. Exciting times to live in!
3. The argument is not especially surprising, but it does combine an asymptotic approach (standard for FDR analysis, see e.g., Genovese and Wasserman, Efron, etc) with a numerical certificate in a way that would be pretty non-standard in the field. Once we have the specific example, then straightforward simulations also support that the false discovery rate is indeed higher than the nominal value (see attached fig).
4. The current degree of violation over the nominal level is relatively small (0.104 vs 0.1). So the importance of this result is mainly conceptual. The practical implications remain to be determined.
Overall, an exciting development! Preprint is available here (faculty.wharton.upenn.edu/wp…) and will be on arxiv tonight; supporting code is here (github.com/dobriban/BH).
