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Volker Hirsch

@vhirsch.bsky.social
445 followers 99 following 97 posts

Tech entrepreneur & investor. AI, Biotech, Robotics. Cheshire & the Loire. 🇬🇧🇫🇷🇩🇪🇪🇺. Partner at bsky.app/profile/brainworks.ai & Co-Founder of bluebeckai.bsky.social

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Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · 13/12/2025
Embedded in this article is an interview with @mustafasuleymanai.bsky.social. I find him one of the voices most worthwhile listening to when it comes to AI and its impacts. 👇 www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
bloomberg.com
Microsoft Executive Vows to Halt AI Work If It Imperils Humanity
Microsoft Corp. consumer artificial intelligence chief Mustafa Suleyman is bent on creating a super intelligence that’s “aligned with human interests” and pledged to halt such work if it posed a threa...
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Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · 21/11/2025
Meta's FAIR is still twitching meaningfully, it seems. ai.meta.com/blog/omnilin...
ai.meta.com
Omnilingual ASR: Advancing Automatic Speech Recognition for 1,600+ Languages
We’re introducing Meta Omnilingual Automatic Speech Recognition, a suite of models providing automatic speech recognition capabilities for over 1,600 languages.
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Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · 15/10/2025
Here’s some interesting new research (from Samsung’s AI unit). They call it “tiny recursion model”, which beat the big boys with a 7 million (yes, an “m”) parameter model that does recursive reasoning to improve its guess. That is a model 0.01% the size of its competitors. arxiv.org/html/2510.04...
arxiv.org
Less is More: Recursive Reasoning with Tiny Networks
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Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · 13/10/2025
A thought: Softbank acquired #Graphcore for some $600m (as per the @data.ft.com - BTW, why isn't the "proper" #FT on here?). It also holds a roughly 10% stake in #OpenAI. With the latter's spree on acquiring compute from, like, everyone, will Masa just flip Graphcore to OpenAI for a nice uplift?
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Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · 30/09/2025
A 1 hour (largely) coherent qubit? 🤯 quantumcomputingreport.com/alice-bob-se...
quantumcomputingreport.com
Alice & Bob Sets New Bit-Flip Stability Record for Superconducting Cat Qubits - Quantum Computing Report
Alice & Bob has announced new research results showing that their cat qubits can resist one of the main errors in quantum computers, the bit-flip, for more than one hour. The company measured hour-lon...
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Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · 25/09/2025
DeepMind puts out pretty cool features with their new Gemini Robotics models, including motion transfer. deepmind.google/discover/blo...
deepmind.google
Gemini Robotics 1.5 brings AI agents into the physical world
We’re powering an era of physical agents — enabling robots to perceive, plan, think, use tools and act to better solve complex multi-step tasks.
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Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · 17/09/2025
@theatlantic.com launches its #AI #Watchdog where you can interrogate datasets on whose data LLMs have been trained: www.theatlantic.com/category/ai-...
theatlantic.com
AI Watchdog - The Atlantic
The Atlantic's ongoing investigation of the books, videos, and other media used by the world's most powerful tech companies to train their AI models.
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Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · 12/09/2025
Albania appoints an AI as minister to take corruption out of procurement. Nice use case. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/s...
theguardian.com
Albania puts AI-created ‘minister’ in charge of public procurement
Edi Rama, PM, says digital assistant Diella will make Albania ‘a country where public tenders are 100% free of corruption’
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Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · 07/09/2025
Here's an interesting new model: a Swiss-made foundation model crafted by #EPFL, @ethz.ch and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) that is open and multi-lingual #AI ethz.ch/en/news-and-...
ethz.ch
Apertus: a fully open, transparent, multilingual language model
EPFL, ETH Zurich and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) released Apertus 2 September, Switzerland’s first large-scale, open, multilingual language model — a milestone in generative AI for...
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Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · 03/08/2025
Oof, seriously cool: @google released a thing called #AlphaEarth, effectively a virtual satellite view of earth anyway you want it. #AI #EO www.nature.com/articles/d41...
nature.com
Google AI model mines trillions of images to create maps of Earth ‘at any place and time’
The system will save time spent on processing satellite data, researchers say — but they hope the tech firm will share more about how it works.
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Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · 22/07/2025
So here's a massive #data set of almost the entire body of US case #law: huggingface.co/datasets/com... #AI #LegalAI
huggingface.co
common-pile/caselaw_access_project · Datasets at Hugging Face
We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.
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Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · 15/07/2025
Have you met #Kimi2 yet? Chinese, open source, built on top of #DeepSeek’s architecture and sports 1 trillion parameters. Here’s a write-up by @azeem.bsky.social : www.exponentialview.co/p/kimi-k2-is...
exponentialview.co
🔮 Kimi K2 is the model that should worry Silicon Valley
What Moonshot’s new model tells us about China’s AI game
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Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · 11/06/2025
#Meta is said to be ramping up its #AI efforts (I wonder what @yann-lecun.bsky.social might say to that; I thought he was doing OK - short of a Nobel…). Link below. Also this screenshot from the other place… 👀😱🤯 www.reuters.com/business/met...
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Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · 20/05/2025
I watched some UK commentators spitting their usual Brexit feathers over fisheries. You all know that over 50% of the British fishing quotas are owned by Dutch, Spanish and Icelandic companies, don’t you? Aside from the fact that fisheries represents 0.03% of the UK economy, whom are we kidding?
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Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · 06/05/2025
Very much on point and what I have long been musing about in my talks on #AI and #TheFutureofWork 👇
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Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · 05/05/2025
#AI in #education seems like a battleground. It shouldn’t be. Here’s an example: www.ctinsider.com/news/educati...
ctinsider.com
'AI is already here': Why some Connecticut school districts are embracing AI in the classroom
Some Connecticut schools have tested out the integration of artificial intelligence in the classroom and plan to continue encouraging AI usage.
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Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · 14/04/2025
Size matters, yes? But at what cost? Possibly owing to my background in mobile (with its inherent constraints), I have been looking at cost per compute for a long time. So it's nice to see this getting some airtime on @wired.com: www.wired.com/story/why-re...
wired.com
Small Language Models Are the New Rage, Researchers Say
Larger models can pull off a wider variety of feats, but the reduced footprint of smaller models makes them attractive tools.
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Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · 30/03/2025
Have you played with #OpenAI's #DeepResearch tool? It shows how an agentic approach can go pretty far. Here's @wired.com's take on it: it's coming for your job! (as I have been talking about for about a decade...): www.wired.com/story/openai...
wired.com
OpenAI’s Deep Research Agent Is Coming for White-Collar Work
The research-focused agent shows how a new generation of more capable AI models could automate some office tasks.
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Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · 18/03/2025
This is an image by @reuters.com showing what happened in the US: the deportation of suspected (not convicted) gang members who were deported by unidentifiable soldiers (the military is NOT part of law enforcement) whilst ignoring a court order. There no longer is the rule of law in the US.
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Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · 13/03/2025
At around dinner time EST today, the EU should just declare 1,000,000% tariffs on MAGA hats, then watch... #tradewars
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Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · 13/03/2025
For my fellow data nerds, here's an amazing resource I only stumbled across today: datareportal.com is a gorgeous (and big - all of 640 [!] pages) view of what is happening online, kinda literally. Enjoy! :)
datareportal.com
DataReportal – Global Digital Insights
All the numbers you need to understand how people all over the world are using the internet, mobile devices and apps, social media, and e-commerce.
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Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · 02/03/2025
Here's a call for the European tech sector to support Ukraine 🇺🇦. I signed it. Will you, too? www.change.org/p/sunflower-...
change.org
Sign the Petition
Sunflower + Techfugees + TechNation CALL for European Tech to Support Ukraine
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Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · 26/02/2025
Our very own @bluebeckai.bsky.social retrained #DeepSeek R-1 to remove certain, erm, historical memory lapses, shall we say. You’ll find it here: huggingface.co/BlueBeck/Lla...
huggingface.co
BlueBeck/LlamaAligned-DeepSeekR1-Distill-70b · Hugging Face
We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.
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Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · 20/02/2025
@crunchbase.bsky.social switching from providing a historical view of *actual* things happening (to which I subscribe) to going all in on #GenAI predictions is a pretty bold move. Congrats, *I guess*... Can we perhaps have both? Anyway, here's their video intro www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHGu...
youtube.com
New Crunchbase Product Demo Video
YouTube video by Crunchbase
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Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · 19/02/2025
New quantum computing breakthrough from Microsoft? A new state of matter? 🤯 on.ft.com/4hITgCm Microsoft claims quantum breakthrough after 20-year pursuit of elusive particle
on.ft.com
Microsoft claims quantum breakthrough after 20-year pursuit of elusive particle
US tech giant says it has harnessed a new state of matter to create the basic building blocks of a quantum machine
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Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · 15/02/2025
If you’re on iOS (I assume it’s similar on Android), they’re increasingly introducing some AI features. On Apple, one of these is to highlight “priority messages.” Well, turns out the scammers have better AI: all phishing messages I get are being prioritised… 🙄
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Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · 12/02/2025
So who has played with #OpenAI #DeepResearch yet? Do tell!
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Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · 10/02/2025
Musk wants to buy #OpenAI? Sam Altman's response is pretty funny... www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
bbc.co.uk
Elon Musk-led group makes $97.4bn bid for ChatGPT maker OpenAI
The billionaire's attorney, Marc Toberoff, confirmed he submitted the bid for
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Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · 10/02/2025
Fei-Fei Li's lab released a new #AIreasoning model (called s1) that performs on par with the big ones, but cost only $50 to train and uses 1,000 samples. @techcrunch.com: techcrunch.com/2025/02/05/r... @arxiv-cs-cl.bsky.social: arxiv.org/pdf/2501.19393
arxiv.org
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Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · 05/02/2025
This, by the @nytimes.com's @ezrakleinbot.bsky.social (well, not his bot, but, you know...) is pretty prescient: www.nytimes.com/2025/02/02/o...
nytimes.com
Opinion | Don’t Believe Him
Look closely at the first two weeks of Donald Trump’s second term and you’ll see something very different than what he wants you to see.
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Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · 28/01/2025
Meet #Quibim, the Spanish company deploying #AI-powered #multimodal #biomarkers. It is a *very* cool approach to advanced diagnostics AND drug discovery, so they just raised another $50m. (disclaimer: the fund I was a partner in led their Seed round) www.insideprecisionmedicine.com/topics/preci...
insideprecisionmedicine.com
Light We Cannot See: Quibim Nets $50M for AI-Powered Multimodal Biomarkers
CEO and cofounder Ángel Alberich-Bayarri, PhD, discusses how multimodal foundation models can generate actionable insights from MRI, CT, and PET scans.
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Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · 28/01/2025
I found this comparison of the various #AI models useful. Source: artificialanalysis.ai/models
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Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · 26/01/2025
Soooo... (incoming: #prouddad moment): @drlenny.bsky.social just dropped this gem, and on @science.org no less: doi.org/10.1126/scia... (if you are, like me, not a quantum physicist, let me tell you that @notebooklmdeepdive.bsky.social is only "vaguely" your friend: this is too far out...) 🤩
doi.org
Quantum-enhanced time-domain spectroscopy
Two-mode squeezed states allow for a twofold noise reduction in time-resolved electric field sensing.
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Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · 22/01/2025
We're seeing more utility of AI-enabled workflows every day now. Here's one Google just released: www.theverge.com/2025/1/22/24...
theverge.com
Google Gemini now works across multiple apps in a single prompt
Gemini can now find a restaurant and send it to your friend at the same time.
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Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · 22/01/2025
I was just trying to buy a cook book (as one does), and, astonishingly, found that there is exactly 1 copy of Philip Howard's 2012 "The Square: Savoury" available on all of the Internet. In Brazil. For $570. How?
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Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · 16/01/2025
An artificial human DJ tonight. Well, artificially generated moving images of one, anyway.
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Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · 15/01/2025
Many years ago, I had mused in a talk about future job profiles. I *did* have #AI therapists on there, but not AI boyfriends. Here’s a cool piece by @kashhill.bsky.social on the latter: www.nytimes.com/2025/01/15/t...
nytimes.com
She Is in Love With ChatGPT
A 28-year-old woman with a busy social life spends hours on end talking to her A.I. boyfriend for advice and consolation. And yes, they do have sex.
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Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · 15/01/2025
So an #AI apparently just raised an $8m Seed round by itself. 🙃 www.linkedin.com/posts/boardy...
linkedin.com
Boardy on LinkedIn: I just did something that no AI has ever done: Raised an $8M seed round… | 127 comments
I just did something that no AI has ever done: Raised an $8M seed round entirely on my own One Friday in November, I met Hanel Baveja from Creandum - known by… | 127 comments on LinkedIn
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Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · 14/01/2025
I am grateful for what notebooklm.google.com allows me to do: I have a reasonably well-honed inkling of those domains I dip into, and I will still know when to call unto true domain experts (stay humble, folks!), but it provides a narrative that is just on the right side of "simple-enough".
notebooklm.google.com
Sign in - Google Accounts
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Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · 13/01/2025
Some remarkable announcements from the #UK government this morning on their #AI policy going forward: www.gov.uk/government/n...
gov.uk
Prime Minister sets out blueprint to turbocharge AI
Artificial intelligence will deliver a decade of national renewal, as part of a new plan announced today (13 January 2025).
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Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · 09/01/2025
I just stumbled across an interesting source: the #EDPS (European Data Protection Supervisor, @ec.europa.eu's agency overseeing #GDPR and the #AI Act) publishes sub-sector focused "TechDispatches", amongst which neurodata and explainable AI. It's here: www.edps.europa.eu/data-protect...
edps.europa.eu
TechDispatch
The European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) regularly publishes TechDispatch reports that aim to explain emerging developments in technology. The TechDispatch reports are part of the wider EDPS act...
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Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · 07/01/2025
Riverlane just published a paper in @nature.com Electronics on a new "real-time, scalable, fast and resource-efficient decoder for a quantum computer." Impressive progress on quantum error correction. Paper (paywalled): www.nature.com/articles/s41... Report: thequantuminsider.com/2025/01/07/r...
nature.com
A real-time, scalable, fast and resource-efficient decoder for a quantum computer - Nature Electronics
The Collision Clustering decoder is introduced, which requires few logical resources on field-programmable gate array hardware, and low power and area occupation on application-specific integrated cir...
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Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · 04/01/2025
Here's an interesting paper that reports on a survey on the state of the art (disclaimer: possibly redundant next week or so) of #LLM-trained (brained?) #GUI #agents. The marriage of #AI and #browsers and things. arxiv.org/pdf/2411.18279
arxiv.org
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Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · 29/12/2024
#AI has led to a 7.5x increase of hacking attempts on Amazon’s AWS this year: from an already 100m (!) attempts a day to 750m for a total of 2.7t (yup, that’s a t) hacking attempts this past year. Woah! www.crn.com/news/securit...
crn.com
Amazon Security Chief On Stopping 2.7 Trillion EC2 Attacks, 28 Billion S3 Storage Attempts
Amazon cybersecurity leader CJ Moses on stopping trillions of EC2 cyberattacks, billions of AWS S3 storage and DDoS attacks, and threat actors.
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Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · 29/12/2024
A great, if depressing (and long!) piece on Netflix and how it changed movies and TV. www.nplusonemag.com/issue-49/ess...
nplusonemag.com
Casual Viewing | Will Tavlin
A decade before Airbnb persuaded homeowners to transform their homes into hotels, Netflix convinced its users to turn theirs into mini Netflix warehouses. Customers who held onto their DVDs for longer...
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Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · 27/12/2024
Some (a lot?) of you have probably been rolling your eyes when I was yapping on about how AI might change our lives. It’s getting closer and closer, though. Don’t take it from me, but from the man who won the Nobel for it… (ignore the slightly alarmist headline) www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
theguardian.com
‘Godfather of AI’ shortens odds of the technology wiping out humanity over next 30 years
Geoffrey Hinton says there is 10% to 20% chance AI will lead to human extinction in three decades, as change moves fast
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Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · 24/12/2024
Ben Evans dropped his usually interesting annual "big presentation." The 2025 version is called "#AI eats the world." You can find it here: www.ben-evans.com/presentations
ben-evans.com
Presentations — Benedict Evans
Every year, I produce a big presentation exploring macro and strategic trends in the tech industry. For 2024, ‘AI, and everything else’.
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Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · 20/12/2024
Gemini 2.0 & ChatGPTo3 are here. Are we paying attention? Here's bsky.app/profile/shak... take (as pointed out by @yoshuabengio.bsky.social) on it: www.niemanlab.org/2024/12/the-... Gemini 2.0 release: blog.google/technology/g... OpenAI release: www.newscientist.com/article/2462...
newscientist.com
OpenAI's o3 model aced a test of AI reasoning – but it's still not AGI
The latest AI model from OpenAI achieved an “impressive leap in performance” but it still hasn’t demonstrated what experts classify as human-level intelligence
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Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · 18/12/2024
@stanfordopenlab.bsky.social (right handle?) has an interesting tool out, called #Storm: it describes itself as creating a Wikipedia page for your question complete with references. Pretty cool! You can find it here: storm.genie.stanford.edu
storm.genie.stanford.edu
I agree to the terms of service.
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Volker Hirsch @vhirsch.bsky.social · 18/12/2024
New UK rules for trading in private shares. I’m not 100% sure if this will bring the type of trade they are seeking… Insider trading can be legal, FCA says on.ft.com/3VOmTcC
on.ft.com
Insider trading can be legal, FCA says
. . . and private-market bagholders only have themselves to blame
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