German and European patent attorney. Ethereum. Zero Knowledge Proofs. Renewable energies.
Munich
Joined January 2012
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Alexander Esslinger retweeted
Munich & Zurich are clearly leading in Physical & Robotics. Not only in Europe, but worldwide!
Both cities combine a strong technical university (Technische Universität München & ETH Zurich) with an environment of manufacturing companies along the supply chain, which can be great first customers for companies in the ecosystem.
That's why these 2 cities were a natural fit when we planned our first 2 Physical AI Meetups together with Modal.
And the choice was right!
Great technical talks, great companies, and an amazing audience of technical people.
See you soon :)
Alexander Esslinger retweeted
Anscheinend haben es Einige immer noch nicht begriffen: Der Anteil der Erneuerbaren an der Weltstromversorgung wächst exponentiell, der Anteil der Atomkraft sinkt kontinuierlich. Es gibt keine Renaissance der Kernkraft, sondern nur jahrzehntedauernde Propaganda.
Alexander Esslinger retweeted
Gas peaker plants are pretty much dead and buried now that battery prices are so low - and getting lower.
pv-magazine.com/2026/10/12/b…
Alexander Esslinger retweeted
Batteries. I’m getting in deep.
We are basically watching Moore's Law re-manifest in physical electrochemistry.
When BESS stationary storage pack prices tumbled past $70/kWh and tier-1 Chinese LFP cells hit the $30–$40/kWh floor, the economics crossed a permanent tipping point.
Alexander Esslinger retweeted
1. CRISPR came from basic research on bacteria.
2. Optogenetics started with a discovery in algae.
3. The GFP protein comes from jellyfish.
The biggest breakthroughs all trace to scientists follow their curiosity. This is one huge reason why we must keep funding basic research!
Alexander Esslinger retweeted
there is an argument (which I've made privately until now) that one of the principal innovations of the large language model labs is a *legal* innovation, not a technical one
by building a system that hoovers up mind-bogglingly large volumes of human information and feeds it into a recombinatorial association machine, the companies have bulldozed the existing IP regime and made the contents of ~all human IP (including the most mundane) searchable, reconfigurable, and usable while also obscuring any trace of origin and eliminating a need to provide credit or attribution. much of the perceived benefit is therefore access and exposure to IP people would not otherwise have had access to, presented behind a system that abstracts the IP from its context and history and presents it as net-new information.
I imagine we would have seen ~similar productivity outcomes had Google actually been allowed to make productive use of the Google Books database over a decade ago.
I’m starting to get increasingly uncomfortable with the economics of AI as it is currently happening
It seems fundamentally wrong that a small number of people with access to a huge amounts of VC money can vacuum up all the contributions of humanity, often paying nothing for it, then turn around and get enormously rich while the many people who put all the work into creating the training data get nothing
I am generally pro-AI, but the way it is happening is seeming increasingly parasitic to me
Alexander Esslinger retweeted
The strongest world model is coming out Freiburg, Germany.
You do not need to go to SF to build frontier-level AI.
LETS GO
Alexander Esslinger retweeted
BREAKING NEWS
The 2026 #NobelPrize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel “for their discoveries concerning light-gated ion channels and optogenetics.”
Alexander Esslinger retweeted
But we're not talking here about a scientist, a journalist, or the average person. Peter Thiel is a libertarian multibillionaire who feels his freedom is being restricted. He is buying political power in order to do away with the control exercised by a liberal democracy
Nothing defines freedom more than thinking and acting different, questioning every supposed truth, consistently. No matter what they say. That‘s why this award for @peterthiel is well deserved. And protest is part of exactly that.
@axelspringer.
Alexander Esslinger retweeted
This remains one of greatest posts of all time and they didn't even realise
Alexander Esslinger retweeted
I don't buy that AI is a threat to humanity for a nerdy statistical reason.
My views are informed by the statistics of things like war. If you look at deaths from human conflicts, you get a continuous spectrum from lots of small events causing a few dozen deaths to rare outliers killing tens of millions.
In my own research, I've studied complex diseases where the overall outcome reflects hundreds of genetic factors combining in different ways.
So if AI can kill billions of people, I would expect to see some version of the same thing: smaller events where one or two of the relevant causal mechanisms are operating, larger events where several combine, and catastrophic events where everything goes wrong at once.
Instead, what we seem to have is real evidence of a few suicides and isolated harms at one end, and wild speculation about complete apocalypse at the other.
That massive discontinuity makes me very skeptical that the AI catastrophic-risk story is real.
Alexander Esslinger retweeted
I must be among an extremely small group of people (n=1?) that have both 1) trained a frontier LLM and 2) designed and synthesized custom viruses in a lab with my own two hands.
And I think that the takes on AI killing us all by creating dangerous viruses is total bogus.
Alexander Esslinger retweeted
BREAKING: OpenAI might have stolen another major proof.
In a detailed Mastodon post, which I report in full in the comments, Andreas Thom presents several pieces of evidence suggesting that OpenAI may have trained Astra on conversations in which he and Gábor Kun were working on Gromov’s soficity conjecture, one of the ten problems OpenAI later announced Astra had solved.
I know Andreas. We met several times early in our careers. He is an exceptional mathematician, a leading expert on sofic and hyperlinear groups, and one of the most respected scholars in the field. He has spent two decades working on this problem.
If his account is correct, this is not a minor dispute over attribution. It would mean that unpublished human work was absorbed into a model and then presented to the world as a breakthrough by the model itself.
And if the allegations raised by Levent Alpöge, Tristan Buckmaster, and now Andreas Thom are all substantiated, we are no longer looking at isolated incidents.
We may be looking at one of the greatest intellectual scandals in the history of science.
AI is not discovering new mathematics.
AI is stealing human discovery.
Alexander Esslinger retweeted
🇩🇪🇪🇺 Germany is not collapsing.
Germany is in crisis only by its own standards.
🔸 Unemployment is 3.8%, versus 5% across the OECD.
🔸 The world’s second-largest trade surplus.
🔸 The lowest debt-to-GDP ratio in the G7.
🔸 Germany hosts 46% of the world’s specialised mid-sized global market leaders.
After decades of exceptional performance, Germany faces a temporary crisis exploited by radicals.
Germany needs major investment in energy, infrastructure and industry, not what the AfD offers.
Alexander Esslinger retweeted
We made history. On just our second flight, we became the first commercial space company from Europe to deliver satellites into orbit. Mission 'Onward and Upward' successfully lifted off and deployed payloads into orbit. A new chapter for European spaceflight. More: isaraerospace.com/press/hist…
Alexander Esslinger retweeted
Der Präsident der TUM hat also das Renommee der TUM in diesen Fragen genutzt, um Leute, die dieses Renommee nicht begründet haben, mit einer Studie zu beauftragen, weil ihm klar war, dass die wirklichen Experten nicht schreiben, was er will. So geht Wissenschaft nicht.
Wer die TUM-Studie geschrieben hat: ein Fördertechniker, ein Kreislaufwirtschaftler, ein Politikwissenschaftler.
Wer nicht gefragt wurde: der Lehrstuhl für Fahrzeugtechnik der eigenen Universität.
Dessen Inhaber sagt jetzt, die 41 Prozent seien zu niedrig gegriffen — weil die Studie überwiegend auf ältere Strom- und Batteriedaten stützt. Sein Fazit: Das E-Auto sei die einzige langfristige Lösung.
Kein Peer Review. Beauftragt vom Uni-Präsidenten persönlich. Vorab an die Bild.
Und daraus wird eine Absage ans Verbrenner-Aus.
ALT Und daraus wird eine Absage ans Verbrenner-Aus.
Alexander Esslinger retweeted
Der kleine gelbe Kringel ganz rechts ist die „Renaissance der Atomkraft“, die „alle außer uns“ angeblich gerade betreiben. Das sind übrigens Strommengen (zusätzliche Terawattstunden), keine Leistung (Terawatt). Das Grüne und das Blaue ist das, was angeblich keiner außer uns baut.
ALT Solar is leading growth in the world's electricity supply lea Growth in global electricity generation by source (TWh), 2026 estimate Total growth in generation: 1087 TW Other 36 Solar PV 613 Wind 172 Nuclear 16 Coal 151 Natural gas 14 Hydropower 85