Engineer|Business Economist|Nature-Lover|Techno-Optimist|Climate Concerned|tweets on tech, econ & nat. sciences
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
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
Matthias Meier retweeted
President Trump is reportedly leaning toward carrying out a major attack on Iranian infrastructure and nuclear sites after the midterm elections - WSJ
The U.S. has told several Gulf Arab countries to be prepared for a short, intense military campaign.
Matthias Meier retweeted
Today, in collaboration with Anthropic, we’re excited to share rapid initial progress towards an antibody treatment for food allergy, which affects over 200 million people worldwide, discovered with the help of Claude.
At Divergence Labs, we believe that AI can unlock the next generation of antibody therapeutics with more effective mechanisms than before. Such mechanisms are urgently needed in food allergy, which involve overcoming one of the tightest affinity protein pairs in immunology, IgE and its receptor FcεRI, on mast cells.
Treatment with Xolair—the only approved antibody for food allergy—sequesters circulating IgE, but mast cells remain sensitized for weeks to months due to the extraordinarily slow dissociation of IgE from FcεRI.
We envision a treatment that actively pulls IgE off of FcεRI, without waiting for natural dissociation. Like picking a lock, this requires the right combination of geometry and force.
Our research team, working with Claude, ideated on mechanisms to accomplish this disruption, and converged on an antibody format with two arms with different functions and epitopes. Within one month, we designed, synthesized, and experimentally confirmed the biophysical function of the two arms, which we are now assembling into full therapeutic formats.
Matthias Meier retweeted
#WahlCH27
Newcomerin @YouGov_Schweiz überrascht mit ungewohntem Umfrage-Ergebnis: Zentrumsparteien GLP und Mitte als Wahlgewinnerinnen, SP, FDP und GPS als Wahlverlierinnen. Mitte liegt demnach eindeutig vor FDP, und GLP ist gleichauf mit GPS.
yougov.com/de-de/artikel/558…
Matthias Meier retweeted
BREAKING: US households now own ~42% of the US equity market, their highest proportion since the late 1990s.
This proportion has risen +7 percentage points since 2020.
Foreign investors are the 2nd-largest owners, accounting for 18%, up from 16% in 2020.
Mutual funds rank 3rd, at 15%, down from 23% in 2020.
Meanwhile, ETF ownership has increased +3 percentage points over the last 6 years, to 10%, its highest on record.
By comparison, pension and retirement funds own 8% of the market, while hedge funds own just 1%.
Household demand for stocks is stronger than ever.
Matthias Meier retweeted
CONCLUSION 🧵(1/2): Putin would have the world, and especially the United States, believe that he is somehow holding back from crushing Ukraine, but that he could do so at any moment of his choosing. The opposite is the case.
If Putin had had a way of ending the war quickly, he surely would have used it. The effort to field an army large enough to make virtually no gains is costing Putin a fortune, driving up inflation in Russia, and generating increasing social discontent. Fielding a larger army would cost more with no guarantee of materially changing the situation on the front. That is why Putin is holding back at least for now. ⬇️
Putin has likely recognized the folly of trying to drown Ukraine in Russian blood and has instead opted to try to hammer Ukraine into submission with a strategic bombing campaign. The Russians have secured a temporary advantage in the skies over Ukraine through their jet-powered drones and the shortage of Patriot missiles that can intercept their ballistic missiles. But Ukraine is fielding solutions to defend against the jet-powered drones, and it is hardening and decentralizing its infrastructure to survive the ballistic missile strikes (as well as developing its own ballistic missile interceptors, although that effort will take time).
The Russian strikes are currently devastating Ukrainian energy and other infrastructure and imposing a brutal cost on Ukrainian civilians—as Putin intends. But there is no reason to think that this strategic bombing campaign will be any more successful than every other strategic bombing campaign in history—all of which have failed to compel a country holding its own on the battlefield to surrender.
It is unclear whether Putin is lying about Russian gains or being lied to by his own military—or both. Russian military correspondents constantly complain of what they call “beautiful reports” that Russian military units send to higher headquarters, claiming gains they have not made. Ukrainian forces say that they have been able to use the Russian military’s own internal culture of lying to their advantage, luring Russian troops into traps because the Russians think that they are moving through territory they control. Leaked Russian military maps show phantom gains, often matching Putin’s claims. The pervasive lying within the Russian military is a problem for Russian soldiers, but likely an advantage for Putin, as it supports his own efforts to present Russian forces as advancing and winning when, in fact, they are doing neither.
Matthias Meier retweeted
Anthropic CEO Amodei: One person with a finger on a button controlling a million robots or drones would fundamentally undermine democracy without the right guardrails.
Human soldiers can refuse orders that contravene the US Constitution. AI models can't. 1/
Matthias Meier retweeted
Similar to what happened in Hungary, Serbia’s RTV-1 publicly apologized to viewers for years of one-sided and uncritical reporting. Presenter Goran Er(r)or said the public service had failed to ask the right questions and had not fulfilled its role. #Serbia
