Cristian Bodnar
@crisbodnar
Co-founder @SilurianAI. Training big neural nets to simulate the world. Previously @MSFTResearch, @Google Brain, @Theteamatx | ML PhD from @Cambridge_Uni
Almost exactly two years after we started working on this at Microsoft, I am happy to see the Aurora foundation being published in Nature. Also a nice gift for Silurian's one-year anniversary 🎉 !
🌍Aurora—now published in Nature—is the first AI to unify weather, air quality, wave & hurricane simulations, while outperforming the top numerical models. With Silurian’s founders playing a key role, this is just the start of our vision for planetary-scale AI. More below 👇
After being on a waitlist for almost a year, I finally had the chance to try the @NekoHealth body scan. Didn’t feel like the usual old-school clinic at all, but more like a sci-fi version of healthcare, built with great taste and attention to detail. What a great product!
The Aurora foundation model is now fully open and MIT licensed (including the weights).
Aurora is fully open! 🥳 The air pollution model 🌬️, the ocean wave model 🌊, and the TC tracker 🌀 are now available. And that's not all: all model weights (pretrained and fine-tuned) are now released under the MIT license. 😎 GitHub: github.com/microsoft/auro… #AIforGood
Proud sibling moment: @andbodnar just co‑authored his first paper! 🎉 The team explores how ML can learn space‑time geometry to tackle general relativity simulations. Great work everyone! PS: Andrei is applying for Master’s/PhD programs this fall, so reach out to him!
General relativity 🤝 neural fields This simulation of a black hole is coming from our neural networks 🚀 We introduce Einstein Fields, a compact NN representation for 4D numerical relativity. EinFields are designed to handle the tensorial properties of GR and its derivatives.
Wealth tax. No country has introduced a tax like this. Actual real life wealth taxes either raise little or hit the middle class more than the mega-wealthy. See prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/economic…
Bringing this up again in the context of the 2% wealth tax in the UK. Sure, taxing "the rich" instead of cutting welfare money sounds great, but wait until every Series A startup founder needs to pay this. We will kill all the growth and a lot more will suffer later.
A common pitfall of extreme socialist policies is that they only consider first order effects but completely disregard higher-order ones specific to the complex systems we live in. That's why they often sound like obvious solutions but often make things worse...
Is there something more badly organised than the Eurostar in Paris?
We need a @FabrizioRomano but for AI researcher transfers.
Me before bed: Probably the U.S. will strike Iran tonight. My gf this morning: Wow, you were right. Me: I know. I was monitoring the situation at 6AM.
Paradoxically, giving yourself permission to drop a book the moment it bores you makes you read far more.
Hot take: The UK has a proud tradition of charitable giving. But imagine if we nurtured entrepreneurship with the same passion. Solving problems at scale would do a lot more good.
Being an AI researcher is a great local maximum: great pay, stimulating work, low stress. That’s why many find it so hard to leave. Starting a company means descending into a valley of suffering before you can climb a higher peak.
I wonder how much the eternal European summer holiday affects B2B startups. If a US and a European startup are both founded on June 1st and begin selling in their respective markets, the European one probably has significantly lower chances of closing any deals by September 1st.
Excited to be attending London Tech Week on Monday and VivaTech in Paris from Wednesday to Friday! If you're around at either event, I'd love to connect—feel free to reach out.
An observation: In the limit, as tech companies get bigger, they eventually build some kind of operating system. Most recent example is GPT becoming the new Windows on top of which the world's AI applications are running.
Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas says he's building a “cognitive operating system.” Not just a browser, but an ambient AI layer that lives with you. “Answers are 4–5 searches in one. Actions are an entire browsing session in one prompt.” The goal isn't search. It's execution.