Building AI infrastructure for science. Professor in economics. @DeSciClaims @SciWeave

Luzern, Switzerland
Joined March 2013
Post-publication review and agentic reproducibility checks are on the roadmap for @DeSciClaims . That's a crucial part for differentiating between weak and strong evidence at scale.
Replying to @Richard_She
I think it's almost certain that they will be in the near future. We need to encourage them to get better quick. Efforts like @PKoellinger's @DeSciClaims system will help get us there. Some of the folks in the labs are working on related efforts as well. It's not like they'd need to be that good to review sociology better than humans do.
2
8
359
Philipp Koellinger retweeted
“Claims provides the best evaluation for scientific records at a cost that scales” Over at @ExploitSummit, Claims co-founder @nashgambit broke down the three key verification models for scientific records within #SN111, all live on mainnet. Bronze: “Inexpensive compute to compare miner submissions with reference outputs.” Silver: “Higher-quality compute used only when there is disagreement between the reference outputs and the miners.” Gold: “Human-assisted adjudication, with a live consensus loop in v1 where miners assess the hard cases Silver can’t resolve automatically.” All three are active now. See the dashboard: dashboard.claims111.ai/
4
1
18
1,364
Nothing beats a live pitch fundraiser. Pure adrenaline. Great job from both competing teams. And fantastic company here with @TaoOutsider! @ExploitSummit @bitstarterAI
I’m really excited to be part of this and help decide who gets to build the next subnet in $TAO Bittensor. Philip from @DeSciClaims is close to me, watching the pitchtensor and we had a hard time deciding which team to pick. Thank you @PKoellinger
3
231
Philipp Koellinger retweeted
Claims V1 is live. After a month of testing on mainnet, @DeSciClaims has moved to a live data production engine. At Exploit, Philipp Koellinger explains the incentive mechanism designed to improve data quality and reduce costs.
9
1
28
1,193
We developed a scalable, accurate approach that translates all the human prose in the scientific literature into a structured, verified machine-readable format that is optimized for agents.
Science on-chain: @DeSciClaims reveal their approach to verification without known answers - and training models on expert human knowledge
1
5
632
Funny how life works out sometimes
In 2012, Christian and Philipp published a game-theoretic model of who becomes an entrepreneur: People who are the best managers of themselves. Fourteen years later, they started Claims. Claims processed the paper last week. The model was not wrong. The puzzle we started from is old and well documented: entrepreneurs earn less than comparable employees, on average. In the US, staying in a salaried job pays better than self-employment, except for the top quarter of entrepreneurs. The usual explanations are overconfidence or a taste for being your own boss. Both are right, but rely on imperfect information or idiosyncratic preferences. We tried a model with neither - in a world with perfect information and income maximization. Picture the labour market as an auction: everyone bids for everyone's work, including their own, and firms form out of the winning bids. You end up an entrepreneur when you create more value running yourself than anyone else could get out of you. That may mean you're brilliant. It may also mean nobody else can manage you. Whatever value such a person creates, no employer will pay them as much as they can make on their own. So they start a firm, and they can end up earning less than the people they hire. In the paper's worked example the employees average 4 and the founder earns 3. More entrepreneurs means more competition for workers. The average wage rises, and the income of the founders already there can go down. It is a mathematical model, with proofs and no empirical tests. It gives a rational reason for entrepreneurship that is compatible with observable income data. Christian @nashgambit and Philipp @PKoellinger won the 2009 EARIE Young Economists' Award for this paper. It was published in the European Economic Review in 2012. Claims processed it. 14 claims identified, each tied to its evidence.
1
5
684
Bittensor is not perfect. But it's one of the smartest, most ambitious projects out there.
OPEN MINDS A short film about Bittensor $TAO
5
234
We're using an open competition to structure scientific knowledge in a machine-optimized format. And the intense competition is leading to rapid improvements in data quality! #science
A core thesis behind Claims is that an open competition will create better results than any in-house process. Our production data is already validating that thesis - in less than 4 weeks! Our measure of data quality is the % of miner-submitted claim-evidence pairs for a given paper that: (1) deviate from our own pipeline and (2) were unanimously evaluated as an improvement by two independent judges who can't see who submitted. That quality benchmark has increased from 70% at launch to 94% now. This happened even though we made our judges MORE critical over time and capped the number of claims any miner can submit to 10, making it much harder for miners to get their work accepted into our Silver record. The competition is working. Our miners are brilliant. The next big step is coming soon.
1
1
5
1,128
Philipp Koellinger retweeted
“The product is validated data. We’re going to the companies we’re already talking to and enriching their data with ontologies that match their particular research questions, adding greater value.” @DeSciClaims appeared on @SubnetSummerTAO yesterday, breaking down how the subnet’s key product is to enhance data for others, through one-time fees and regular subscriptions where incoming and relevant information is consistently fed, sharpening their research. Watch the full podcast to learn about roadmaps, architecture, and incentives.
🚨 Subnet Summer AMA x SN111 @DeSciClaims - NOW LIVE ON YOUTUBE We covered: - What SN111 Claims is and why making science machine-readable matters - The DeSci opportunity: $3 trillion of knowledge locked in human-readable papers - How miners extract claims, how validators audit for integrity - The product roadmap: turning a knowledge graph into a revenue-generating API If you're interested in decentralised science, AI-driven research infrastructure, or how Bittensor tackles knowledge accessibility, this one's for you. youtu.be/9bOyBIJprro?si=lFJg…
3
16
935
If you're curious about what we're building at @DeSciClaims, check out this podcast. Fun convo with @SubnetSummerT
🚨 Subnet Summer AMA x SN111 @DeSciClaims - NOW LIVE ON YOUTUBE We covered: - What SN111 Claims is and why making science machine-readable matters - The DeSci opportunity: $3 trillion of knowledge locked in human-readable papers - How miners extract claims, how validators audit for integrity - The product roadmap: turning a knowledge graph into a revenue-generating API If you're interested in decentralised science, AI-driven research infrastructure, or how Bittensor tackles knowledge accessibility, this one's for you. youtu.be/9bOyBIJprro?si=lFJg…
1
3
159
Philipp Koellinger retweeted
23 clinical trials had tested whether switching off a woman's ovaries helps her survive #BreastCancer. But not one could tell whether it adds anything on top of the drugs she is already taking. These cancers are fed by oestrogen. Before menopause the ovaries are the main source, so they can be taken out with surgery, closed down with radiation, or switched off with drugs. The drugs are chemotherapy and tamoxifen. Chemotherapy kills dividing cells. Tamoxifen stops the cancer from responding to oestrogen. Earlier reviews had found no clear benefit from switching off the ovaries. So the Early Breast Cancer Trialists' Collaborative Group went back for the individual records: what happened to each woman, rather than each trial's summary results. 18,851 women. That is 98.9% of every woman randomised in eligible trials of this treatment. The oldest trial began enrolling in 1948, at the Christie Hospital in Manchester (@TheChristieNHS). It was the first cancer treatment ever assessed in a randomised trial. Its long-term survival data came from @NHS records. The women were typically in their early forties when they joined, and were followed for more than a decade. The result, among women who were under 45 when they joined and were already taking tamoxifen: 9.1% of those who also had their ovaries switched off had died of breast cancer within ten years. Among those on tamoxifen alone, 11.7% had. In the older trials, where none of the women received tamoxifen, the gap was wider. Cancer came back within 15 years in 39.1% of the women whose ovaries were switched off, and in 56.5% of the women whose were not. Switching off the ovaries has costs. The women whose ovaries were switched off had consistently more severe hot flushes than the women whose were not, and it is known to cause bone loss, which can be monitored and managed. Only 4 of the 23 trials measured quality of life at all. Across the trials there was no increase in deaths from other causes, and none in second cancers. This paper went through Claims this week: 8 adjudicated claims, each tied to its evidence. This is the shape of question we want a claim-evidence graph to surface: 23 trials, one claim between them, and no single paper that settles it. Getting the answer still needs the individual patient records, the original investigators and a national mortality register. The Claims database and AI do not produce that part. But they can point to where someone should look.
4
6
3
22
3,735
One of the first 1000 papers processed by @DeSciClaims after our mainnet launch last Friday
Your liver gets the blame for your cholesterol. But part of the instructions come from your brain. MC4R is a receptor in the brain that regulates appetite. About three in a thousand people carry a broken MC4R gene copy, and they gain weight early and heavily. Researchers at @Cambridge_Uni and @unige_en compared these carriers with 336,728 people in the @uk_biobank. Correcting for the weight itself, the carriers had lower cholesterol and triglycerides. A meal test caught the same effect in real life. 11 carriers, 15 controls matched for weight, a 674 calorie meal at 60 percent fat. The triglyceride spike was about half as big in the carriers. In the same biobank, common obesity built from many small variants carried clear extra heart risk. Obesity from this one broken receptor showed no detectable increase in that risk. Same weight on the scale. Different consequence, depending on the route that produced it. Zorn et al., @NatureMedicine 2025. doi.org/10.1038/s41591-025-0… This paper went through Claims this week: 8 claims, each tied to the evidence behind it. @Farooqi_Lab
2
246
Philipp Koellinger retweeted
Ep. 99 - Philipp Koellinger & Christian Roessler Philipp and Christian are building Claims @DeSciClaims Subnet 111 Timestamps 0:00 - Highlights 1:48 - Proof of Pitch to Mainnet in Three Months 2:50 - Why Economists Find Bittensor Fascinating 3:42 - Citations as Science's Reward Function 4:29 - The Replication Nobody Would Publish 6:53 - How Much Published Science Is Wrong 8:26 - The AI Echo Chamber vs. Human Work 9:54 - Making 300 Million Papers Machine Readable 15:11 - Reproducibility vs. Citations 15:46 - Turning Papers Into a Knowledge Graph 16:20 - Why LLMs Hallucinate Citations 21:21 - Longer Context Windows Make This Obsolete? 22:56 - Coverage, Extraction Quality & Evidence Quality 25:16 - What Counts as a Substantive Claim 26:42 - What This Is Worth to Working Academics 27:37 - Academia Admits the System Is Broken 29:26 - How Do You Actually Find the Truth? 32:06 - Truth as Probability, Not Zero or One 33:33 - Logical Proof vs. Physical Replication 35:44 - Correlation vs. Causality 36:28 - Ground Truth From Replication Studies 38:12 - Codifying Claims to Surface Contradictions 40:14 - Can You Trust an LLM as a Judge? 42:48 - Synthetic Checks: Truth Is Sparse 45:40 - How Much Miner Variance Is Desirable 46:55 - Why Bittensor Instead of a Closed Company 49:50 - Success, Revenue & the Palantir Comparison 51:47 - The Flood of AI-Written Papers 54:36 - Advice for Discerning Truth
2
6
5
26
5,053
This is the best explanation of #Bittensor I've seen so far. I read this aloud to a friend and it's the first time I got a "ah, now I understand why you're so excited!"
Okay, consensus is that this is pretty good, so I've given it a perm URL: pill.taobubbles.net For the web-based, simple-stupid explanation of Bittensor for your normie friends. Send it around!
1
3
26
3,289
Philipp Koellinger retweeted
Claims V0 is live on mainnet. Here’s how mining works. Every six hours, Claims puts ~50 scientific papers in front of 10 competing miners. Miners extract the claims and evidence. Validators test the work. The strongest batch earns the most weight. Here’s the full loop. 🧵
1
6
3
36
2,790
Science friends, come join us! Set up a miner with your Claude on SN111, turn the scientific literature into a verifiable knowledge graph, and earn!
Claims is live on mainnet. Miners now compete to turn papers into structured claims and source evidence. Validators score the work. The best work earns the weight. Each round builds the canonical graph of science. 450 testnet papers led here. Day 0 starts now.⏱️
1
1
12
991
Philipp Koellinger retweeted
Everyone's worried about AI hallucinating sources for its facts. But that's the easy half of the problem. The hard half: when a cited paper is real, knowing whether the finding inside is too. One landmark study is titled, literally, "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False." When a pharma company went back to reproduce dozens of high-profile results, most didn't hold up. P-hacking, underpowered studies, failed replications buried in the file drawer - the errors are baked into the record itself. Retrieval doesn't solve this. It hands you the paper and repeats what the author said. It can't tell you the result was contradicted three times since, or never replicated once. And the pile keeps growing. Since ChatGPT, the rate of new submissions has increased by ~50% - more claims stacked on the same broken foundation. That's what Claims exists to fix. Not just "find the paper," but map every claim, the evidence for and against it, and how much of it actually survives contact with the rest of the field. 👉 Follow our progress on Discord: discord.gg/phE5N3uT
1
10
26
1,107