Chris Offner

3D computer vision, spatial AI, and synthetic data @Google Zurich. prev: @rai_inst, @ETH_en. visual computing, machine learning, robot perception.

[Chris Offner @chrisoffner3d]

When vision people do graphics, they call it "image synthesis." When graphics people do vision, they call it "inverse rendering". ;)

[Susan Zhang @suchenzang]

don't be afraid to escape your internet social bubbles and rizz up some ladies, my dudes

(but earnestly tho, like the 🐐 here)

this is how you avoid entropy collapse!

[Chris Offner @chrisoffner3d]

@NathanBLawrence @TomZohar The Lobster was a dark comedy.

[Chris Offner @chrisoffner3d]

@xeophon The way of the ML researcher.
https://t.co/F8CNZvS4R9

[Chris Offner @chrisoffner3d]

@Laz4rz The AI community has taught me to only acknowledge rankings that I’m crushing.

[Chris Offner @chrisoffner3d]

@giffmana @Miles_Brundage

[quetzal_rainbow @quetzal_rainbow]

I remind you that in 2000s people believed that everyone would have a personal website

[Chris Offner @chrisoffner3d]

My MacBook now has more RAM than the beefiest Mac Studio you can buy.

[Milo Smith @mil000]

Apple has officially removed every option for ram on the M3 Ultra Mac Studio other than 96gb. It’s really over isn’t it

[Colin McCarthy @US_Stormwatch]

One of the worst heatwaves in European history is underway.

Peak high temperatures forecast this week:

France: 45°C / 113°F Monday-Tuesday
London: 39°C / 102°F
Amsterdam: 34°C / 93°F
Berlin: 38°C / 100°F
Paris: 41°C / 106°F

[Chris Offner @chrisoffner3d]

@EastlondonDev @SebJohnsonUK @nathanbenaich The problem is having to convince a bunch of boomers to care about more than their own immediate comfort. If you can do that you can do absolutely anything.

[François Fleuret @francoisfleuret]

Actual picture of me comparing the performance of my fantastic new architecture compared to a vanilla decoder transformer when I do a proper normalization of flops and memory.

[Chris Offner @chrisoffner3d]

Turns out I'm a bacterium.
https://t.co/BfZhurRTwL

[Carl Benedikt Frey @carlbfrey]

My latest in the @FT today. I make four points:

1) Capitalism's great achievement was moving activity out of the household and into the market — turning domestic production into paid specialisation, creating jobs, and making output visible to the national accounts. AI-enabled self-service might quietly reverse that centuries-long trend.

2) When a technology automates tasks within a service, it can trigger a Jevons paradox: the service gets cheaper, demand expands, and employment grows. When it lets people do the work themselves, demand for the service collapses.

3) AI extends this even to the manual trades, the supposed safe haven of the AI age. If a homeowner can ask a chatbot why their boiler keeps losing pressure, heating engineers lose call-outs.

4) When work shifts to the consumer, it vanishes from the economy statisticians measure. Replace a billing department with a chatbot and a firm records lower costs and higher output per worker; the national accounts register a productivity gain. But the hours patients spend decoding their own test results appear nowhere — not in labour statistics, not in GDP. As self-service spreads into professional domains, that blind spot will grow.

[kasra @kasratweets]

now that AI makes information consumption and transformation easier than ever I would like to bring back this old banger by Sasha Chapin about how books are not information transfer devices but subjectivity-merging devices

in fact I would say content consumption in general is more about subjectivity-merging than information transfer, which is why I am generally much more interested in writing by humans than by AI

[Chris Offner @chrisoffner3d]

@infoxiao “Irritability with stupid fucking questions!”

[Cunxiang Wang @CunxiangWang]

@thomasunise @Zai_org in several months

[Chris Offner @chrisoffner3d]

@giffmana Agents running smoke tests is awesome but now compilation time often becomes the bottleneck. When agents rapidly iterate and repeatedly compile code, it raises the bar for compilation speed far beyond what was deemed acceptable performance for human development.

[Chris Offner @chrisoffner3d]

@giffmana Agents running smoke tests is awesome but now compilation time often becomes the bottleneck. When agents rapidly iterate and repeatedly compile code, it raises the bar for compilation speed far beyond what was deemed acceptable performance for human development.

[Chris Offner @chrisoffner3d]

I hope the new American Psycho movie knows what year it is.

[Jimmy Heaters @CathPoaster]

I have better taste than you, don’t you get it? I went to Stanford, you went to Berkeley. I wear Common Projects, you wear Veja. My consumer tech is Teenage Engineering, you got yours from Best Buy. I live in San Francisco, you live in San Jose. I’m a member of technical staff, you are an engineer. Everything about me is out of distribution, you’re more of an average. I read Nick Land, you read Jared Diamond. You can’t understand me, I know everything about you. I’m an exited founder, you’re employee # whatever. I go to exclusive parties, you go to hackathons. I live in Pac Heights…you don’t live in Pac Heights. I’m me, and you are you. You could be me if important people allowed you to be. But I’d never be you. I need you to know this. I really really really need you to know this.

[hirad @hiradp]

never worked anywhere that fights big company antics as actively as we do.

[Chris Offner @chrisoffner3d]

@DominiqueCAPaul @mrza_ch Really awesome! ✊

[ludwig @ludwigABAP]

it's very possible every one of the greats were all kinds of stupid and the only reason people like Hinton appear as retarded as they do now is because they're constantly touring in front of cameras having to unfold their picture of the world on demand

people just used to say less, or do it in a very asynchronous manner, in letters, in prepared talks and lectures, in great correspondences

but now there is a sickly incentive to just continuously share your thoughts on everything in the most surface level way possible, and for the ensouled, it breaks the "hero" or "great thinker" kind of archetype of many of the greats

there are only a few real clever people out there who don't truly appear as fully retarded and do go on podcasts and talk at length, and the reason for that is that they tend to have a certain pudor of thought, a certain sophistication, an aversion for reduction, so they simply avoid engaging on certain things, or they diffuse the questions, or they tactfully and playfully kind of engage with it without overtly strong commitments (which is a good sign, imo)

in the last decade, I can think of a few - maybe one of them has been Scott Aaronson for example