@AMD Global GR Lead - 35 yrs in tech/natsec policy - Senate staff alum & procedure nerd - Wordsmith - ‘70s TV alum - Look at the Whole Board - Opinions = Me

Washington, DC
Joined February 2012
Robert Hoffman retweeted
JMU: 6-0 JMUCLA: 5-0 JMU Bloomington: 6-0 The strong start for James Madison and it’s satellite campuses continues
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Robert Hoffman retweeted
Replying to @MELANIATRUMP
Thank you Madam First Lady for your kind words! I’m deeply honored to receive the National Medal of Science and truly appreciate your support of women’s leadership through IMPERIA.
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Robert Hoffman retweeted
We are in a very unique moment with agents. It was a delight to be invited by @Microsoft to their reveal today of several new agentic capabilities for Windows and to talk to @satyanadella and @JensenHuang . - MXC containers - a local sandbox for agentic execution. - Hybrid intelligence of actions that can take effect using local models or be routed to models in the cloud. - Brand new Copilot experiences around agentic usage (@jacobandreou had a very fun demo doing his taxes without any remote models being involved) - Powered on a new gen of local hardware starting with the Surface Laptop Ultra/ Nvidia RTX Spark. Stepping back, we are obviously at the beginning of a new era of agents and we are figuring out new primitives and standards as we go along. I for one am looking forward to not having to give my agents full access to everything for menial tasks. Some photos from today.
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Robert Hoffman retweeted
5 live football games streamed simultaneously on a commercial flight with @Starlink
BREAKING: A passenger used @Starlink to stream 5 live college football games at once across 3 seatback screens and 2 laptops from his own empty exit row. United now has Starlink on 500+ planes.
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Robert Hoffman retweeted
I remember the first meeting where the team pitched the idea of putting compute in space - exciting idea! Today's successful launch with our partner @planet prototype satellite shows how far we've come...and how far there is to go. Thanks for the lift, @SpaceX, another spectacular booster landing too🚀
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Robert Hoffman retweeted
BIG MOMENT FOR AMD🚨THIS WEEK: AMD HAS REACHED ABOVE 90% PARITY ON UPSTREAM vLLM GATING TEST GROUPS! This was after months of hard work from AMD maintainers, specifically Andreas, and also vLLM CI Lead Kevin, along with SemiAnalysis getting vLLM enough CI AMD GPUs after months of upstream maintainer complaints about not having enough AMD GPUs on vLLM and AMD CI fleet-wide stability issues. (1/3)🧵
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Robert Hoffman retweeted
Yesterday was a historic day at the White House. President Trump, as only he can, brought together the world’s leading technology and Super Intelligence innovators for consequential conversations about the future of this transformational technology — and America’s role in leading it. Those meetings were followed by major announcements to advance American innovation, strengthen responsible development, and ensure the United States remains the global leader in Super Intelligence.
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Robert Hoffman retweeted
It was an honor to join @POTUS and so many leaders from government and technology at the @WhiteHouse today for an important discussion on the future of Super Intelligence. Today was a significant step forward, and a moment for our industry to step up. Super Intelligence has incredible potential to make a real difference in people’s lives and across society. We are committed to doing our part and working together across the entire ecosystem to ensure we get it right. Thank you @POTUS for your leadership and for bringing us together.
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I just chatted with $AMD's SVP of AI Vamsi Boppana. Here are some incremental adds to the previous post. -Scope is AMD-wide. Not just physical AI. He called the team a nucleus to attract more talent. The insight is meant to come from model development at large, and the team was already heading into multimodal models. -No frontier competition, by design. He said competing with customers at the frontier is "not the intent at all." He framed the non-language focus as a deliberate choice to stay complementary to customers' LLM work. -Not an open-model push. He declined to frame it as an open-model strategy. AMD wants the capability for a world of many specialized models; one customer told him it needs 10,000. That's softer than Fei-Fei's public commitment to providing open models and platforms. -Horizontal, with no lead segment. He named content and media, robotics and embedded, and data center prediction and reasoning, calling it "a horizontal models capability for the company." He didn't name a first product or a robotics customer. -Built on AMD, deployed anywhere and on anything. Training will lean toward AMD, with more compute behind it. Deployment stays multi-platform because World Labs already has products running on other platforms. He gave no Instinct share. -The roadmap link is in-house experimentation. His explanation was that he has often wanted people who could "model this and actually train something" to test hardware ideas. That's the mechanism; he gave no MI500, MI600 or Kria specifics and I didn't expect him, too. -Talent and roadmap together drove the price. AMD saw World Labs' undisclosed roadmap and was "blown away." It already has a models team behind its Instella models and five NeurIPS papers, which this deal takes further. -Commercial status quo for now. For Marble, the API and Autodesk, nothing changes near term, and how they evolve is TBD.
$AMD is buying @theworldlabs for ~$8.2B in stock, and Fei-Fei Li (@drfeifei) will join as EVP and chief scientist reporting to @LisaSu. I called Fei-Fei a great hire for Google Cloud back in 2017. Same here. This wasn't out of the blue, either. Lisa had her on stage at CES in January, AMD invested in World Labs' round in February, and per Fei-Fei, World Labs has been doing training and inference work on AMD GPUs since last year. Some thoughts: -This is a talent and model-insight buy, not a revenue play. AMD gets the people building the models its future chips will have to run. Fei-Fei made the case from her side: "Without having a focused hardware effort, AI is hobbled in efficiency." -The target is physical AI. NVIDIA built its own world models with Cosmos, plus GR00T for humanoids, and uses them as pull for Jetson, RTX and DGX. (My colleague @factoryguy nailed it: the models are free, but the silicon is not.) AMD didn't have that team. Now it does, and it isn't a Cosmos clone. World Labs builds persistent 3D worlds. Cosmos grew out of video. -NVIDIA built its models, then paid ~$13B for Hugging Face. AMD is buying its way into the model layer, and Fei-Fei says the work stays open. -I've said AMD's valuation is super rich. Using that stock to buy scarce talent at less than 1% of market cap is the right move. - $NVDA and $INTC are both World Labs investors. In an all-stock deal, those stakes should turn into AMD shares. What I still need to see is a marquee robotics customer. In July I said AMD hadn't earned the right to play in robotics the way NVIDIA and Qualcomm did through automotive. World Labs' SceniX deal adds robotics simulation, which helps. It doesn't land a customer. Silo AI, ZT Systems, Taalas and now World Labs. AMD keeps filling in the stack. newsroom.amd.com/news/amd-ac…
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$AMD is buying @theworldlabs for ~$8.2B in stock, and Fei-Fei Li (@drfeifei) will join as EVP and chief scientist reporting to @LisaSu. I called Fei-Fei a great hire for Google Cloud back in 2017. Same here. This wasn't out of the blue, either. Lisa had her on stage at CES in January, AMD invested in World Labs' round in February, and per Fei-Fei, World Labs has been doing training and inference work on AMD GPUs since last year. Some thoughts: -This is a talent and model-insight buy, not a revenue play. AMD gets the people building the models its future chips will have to run. Fei-Fei made the case from her side: "Without having a focused hardware effort, AI is hobbled in efficiency." -The target is physical AI. NVIDIA built its own world models with Cosmos, plus GR00T for humanoids, and uses them as pull for Jetson, RTX and DGX. (My colleague @factoryguy nailed it: the models are free, but the silicon is not.) AMD didn't have that team. Now it does, and it isn't a Cosmos clone. World Labs builds persistent 3D worlds. Cosmos grew out of video. -NVIDIA built its models, then paid ~$13B for Hugging Face. AMD is buying its way into the model layer, and Fei-Fei says the work stays open. -I've said AMD's valuation is super rich. Using that stock to buy scarce talent at less than 1% of market cap is the right move. - $NVDA and $INTC are both World Labs investors. In an all-stock deal, those stakes should turn into AMD shares. What I still need to see is a marquee robotics customer. In July I said AMD hadn't earned the right to play in robotics the way NVIDIA and Qualcomm did through automotive. World Labs' SceniX deal adds robotics simulation, which helps. It doesn't land a customer. Silo AI, ZT Systems, Taalas and now World Labs. AMD keeps filling in the stack. newsroom.amd.com/news/amd-ac…
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Robert Hoffman retweeted
Wonderful morning in New York! Honored to join @FLOTUS and @lynnmartin at @NYSE for the launch of IMPERIA, and to speak with @LizClaman about the future of AI and leadership. Great energy in the room and a thoughtful conversation.
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Robert Hoffman retweeted
The theaters in DC will be sold out, not sure about other cities
Here is official trailer, You Can See Everything
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Saddened to learn of the passing of Sen Jon Kyl, a dedicated public servant for his state & country in the House & #Senate. He stayed true to his conservative roots while seeking #bipartisan solutions to many policy challenges. As a legislator, he embodied the qualities & virtues of Teddy Roosevelt’s “man in the arena”, notably persistence, resilience, moral character & action-oriented #leadership. My prayers & best wishes to his personal & professional families during this difficult time. kjzz.org/politics/2026-09-17…
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Robert Hoffman retweeted
My name is Chris Painter, and I'm the President of METR (Model Evaluation and Threat Research). I know we've made a lot of new friends on the internet the last couple of days, so I thought I'd take this chance to re-up what we do and why. Our work is aimed at making sure that if AI really were autonomous, difficult to steer, and close to "going rogue," the public would find out. If evidence exists inside of an AI company that it’s close to losing control of AI, we want to make sure that information gets shared with the rest of the world, including governments and the public outside the company’s walls. This is what we've been focused on since 2022, and over the years we've worked with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta, Amazon, and others on piloting third-party assessments and investigations of this type. We don’t have some private room where we rubber stamp things as “safe” or not. We have had a track record of publishing results on AI that don't cleanly map onto the "doomer" or "accelerationist" labels, and we put in effort to hire people with competing views on AI. We’ve been cited for having found some of the strongest evidence that AI capabilities are improving rapidly (our work measuring AI “time horizons”) while also presenting some of the strongest evidence that, at various points, AI’s capability may be overstated (some might remember our study showing that early 2025 software engineers were actually being slowed when they thought they were being sped up). METR is funded by donations. We don't accept money from frontier AI companies. They haven't paid us for our work, and we don't accept donations from them or their employees. As we’ve shared previously, multiple frontier AI companies currently provide us with free access to their models in order to perform our evaluations, research, and engineering. Our funding intentionally comes from a wide range of donors, which we’ve shared on our website. Today, when an AI company works with any third-party evaluator or external testing organization (of which there are and should be many), it's entirely voluntary. This often involves NDAs and redactions. To counterbalance this, we have a principle that when we enter into a contract with a company, we try to retain the right to tell the public the terms of the contract we signed, and characterize the nature of redactions that the company chose to make. For example, the report from our independent investigation of the OpenAI-HuggingFace incident included that information. Public disclosure is also a big part of our COI policy (linked on our website). That’s not to say our reports are adequate as oversight. We’re just one organization (among many doing great work), working in a voluntary setup, trying to get good evidence to the public and the world about AI, letting the facts fall where they may.
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Robert Hoffman retweeted
I reread this every year. I cry like a baby every year. Todd Beamer died a father, husband, and hero. Todd: Hello… Operator… listen to me. I can’t speak very loud. This is an emergency. I’m a passenger on a United flight to San Francisco. Our plane has been hijacked. Lisa: I understand. Can they see you? Todd: No. There are three that we know of. They have knives — razor knives, like box cutters. Someone announced from the cockpit there was a bomb. It sounded fake. Lisa: Your name?Todd: Todd Beamer. United Flight 93.Todd: They killed one passenger in first class. They forced most of us back. Fourteen of us here. Five flight attendants. The guy with the bomb ordered us to sit on the floor. Lisa: Are you okay? Todd: We’re going down… wait. No. We’re leveling off. We changed directions. We’re flying east again. Todd: A guy named Jeremy called his wife. She told him two planes hit the World Trade Center. Lisa, is that true? Lisa: I have to tell you the truth. It’s very bad. Both towers are gone. A third plane hit the Pentagon. Our country is under attack. I’m afraid your plane may be part of their plan. Todd: Oh God. Lisa, will you do something for me? Call my wife and my kids. Promise me you’ll call. Lisa: I promise. Todd: Our home number is… You have the same name as my wife. Lisa. We’ve been married ten years. She’s pregnant with our third child. Tell her I love her. I’ll always love her. We have two boys — David, he’s 3, and Andrew, he’s 1. Tell them their daddy loves them and he is so proud of them. The baby is due January 12th. I saw an ultrasound. We still don’t know if it’s a girl or a boy. Lisa: I’ll tell them. I promise, Todd.(Lisa patches in the FBI.) Agent: Todd, your plane is on a course for Washington. Best guess is the White House or the Capitol. Todd: I understand. I’ll be back. Todd: Everyone knows this isn’t a normal hijacking. We have decided we will not be pawns in their plot. Lisa: What are you going to do? Todd: Four of us are going to rush the one with the bomb. Then the cockpit. A stewardess is getting boiling water. We’ll take them out. Todd: Would you pray with me?They pray the Lord’s Prayer. Then: Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me. Todd: God help me. Jesus help me.Are you guys ready? Let’s Roll.
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Robert Hoffman retweeted
Creating richer digital worlds takes more than imagination. It takes breakthrough compute. On the latest episode of Advanced Insights, AMD CTO Mark Papermaster joins @WetaFXOfficial CTO Kimball Thurston to explore the future of visual effects, from large-scale rendering and simulation to AI-assisted creative workflows. Watch now: bit.ly/3Uix1fN
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Robert Hoffman retweeted
"Growing up, she and her brother Jack had ponies named Maine and Vermont after the only two states their father won in the presidential election kansascity.com/news/politics…
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Sad to hear of the passing of Sen Nancy Kassebaum Baker. I had the honor of working with her & her team in the #Senate. She relentlessly pursued results over rhetoric and put her pragmatic approach on numerous pieces of legislation. My prayers are with her extended personal & work families during this difficult time. apnews.com/article/nancy-kas…
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Robert Hoffman retweeted
God damnit, every one of my AI founder friends who actually have revenue are now just transforming into neoclouds with value add on top – at San Francisco, CA
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Robert Hoffman retweeted
Harvey is a great example of how American companies are building world-class specialized models: they took an open-source base (Kimi K3), post-trained it on legal data, and delivered state-of-the-art performance on legal benchmarks at a fraction of the cost of frontier models. Restrictions that kneecap open models would do nothing to stop Chinese labs from shipping the next Kimi. They would, however, cripple the ability of startups like Harvey to create high-performance, low-cost vertical models. Of course some of the closed labs would love this — it eliminates their competition.
Introducing Tenet, our first model post-trained for legal. Tenet is a Kimi K3 base that we post-trained with @FireworksAI_HQ on a corpus of publicly available legal data, synthetic data, and human expert data simulating long-horizon legal work. Training increases Tenet's all-pass rate by 82% on LAB and 22% on LAB Contracts relative to the Kimi K3 base model. It achieves state-of-the-art performance on LAB Contracts and places second on LAB. These gains generalize to other leading agentic benchmarks including @mercor's Apex Agents - Corporate Law, @crosbylegal's Redline Bench, and @scale_AI's Professional Reasoning Bench. Tenet is also optimized for token efficiency, operating at less than a fourth the cost of leading foundation models. We additionally post-trained three specialist models for Tenet to use as subagents: 1) M&A Diligence: post-trained with @baseten on our LAB Diligence environment in an RLM harness, this model is optimized for high-scale, long-horizon tasks. 2) Review Tables: trained with @appliedcompute on our Review Table environment, this model is state-of-the-art and cost-effective at high-volume document review and structured data extraction. 3) Firm Knowledge: trained with @EngramLab on our synthetic law firm environment, this model is optimized to learn and search over a firm's knowledge via memory and structured notes. More details on model training, environment design, benchmarking, results, and more in the article by @gabepereyra below. What's next for Harvey’s research? - Scaling LAB to more jurisdictions, practice areas and workflows - Scaling compute to bring new generalist models and capabilities to Harvey More to come soon.
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