me

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

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

The other half of my life is dedicated to building Parsed. We train performant and interpretable language models for custom use cases using reinforcement learning.

In a past life I co-founded Rake News, 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 innate immunology, neurodegeneration and cardiology at the University of Sydney, ANU, and the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute.