me

Hi, I’m Max Kirkby. I’m a Co-Founder of Parsed, an AI startup based in San Francisco, and a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. I’m originally from Adelaide, South Australia.

At Parsed, I primarily research the methods for training smaller, faster and more efficient language models for specific use cases. See some of this work here, here and here.

At Oxford I am studying for a PhD in Computational Neuroscience. My research tries to understand the neural algorithms that represent hierarchical plans and the subgoals within these plans. I work with Thomas Akam at Oxford and Tim Behrens at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre in London.

In a past life I co-founded Rake, a personalised news platform built with language models that later evolved to provide enterprise-grade RAG. I was also a Tuckwell Scholar at the ANU, where I completed a Bachelor of Philosophy (Science) in biology, neuroscience and mathematics. I had the chance to do interesting research across neuroimaging, neurodegeneration, immunology and cardiology at the University of Sydney, ANU, and the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute.