
Canadian 🇨🇦 Senior Fellow @munkschool "Peux ce que veux. Allons-y." Views my own.
Toronto
Joined June 2009
- Tweets295
- Following3.7K
- Followers3.8K
- Likes68.7K
Pinned Tweet
I've been teaching a master's course on AI at @UofT 's @munkschool - and I'm excited to share it with you!
One of the best parts has been the calibre of guest lecturers: folks from @AnthropicAI @GoogleDeepMind and @law_ai_. This week, Mark Surman — @mozilla President and one of the most important voices on open source AI — came by and gave us a fantastic walkthrough of how he's thinking about the evolution of the internet to frontier AI, and Canada's role as a middle power.
When I told him about the course, his first reaction: "You should open source it."
So we did. Full syllabus and a couple AI agents and resources we've built together — all on GitHub: github.com/jaxson/ai-policy-…
Covers everything from the AI supply chain to frontier model governance to hands-on prototyping. More materials and agents coming at the end of term.
Feel free to use it, remix it, share it.
And remember a future with plenty of open source AI is a good one!
Jaxson Khan retweeted
Our newest book is finally here!
Making the Modern Laboratory is a spectacular 504-page hardcover that tells the story of everything in the research laboratory and how it came to be, from pipettes to heat-resistant glass to microscopes and more.
It features dozens of articles (most of which will never appear in print), 100+ full-color images, and original writing from 36 authors. It's printed on Arena Natural Rough paper from Fedrigoni. These books are THICC and would make a great gift for both the science-curious and the working scientist. :)
We have spent the last year working on this project. It has been an insane labor of love. The best way to support our independent science journalism is to buy a copy. <3
Pre-order for $49, with free shipping: press.asimov.com/articles/mo…
Jaxson Khan retweeted
Going live to talk about worms (and cyber / autonomy / agents and whatever) in a bit here:
MTS is LIVE - here's what we're talking about this morning:
- Gemini 4 Argon beats Minecraft
- China instilling new export controls on AI and other tech
- Taiwan planning $4 billion chip facility in Texas
Followed by some great interviews:
- @scottaar Professor at UT Austin talking about his recent writing and the rapid rate of AI capabilities growth in mathematics
- @logangraham Frontier Red Team lead at Anthropic talking about self-replicating AI and autonomous worms
- @RyanFedasiuk and @Satvik_Pen of AEI talking about their recent writing on AI chip restrictions and the race for chips
- @SamoBurja Founder of Bismarck Analysis talking about live v. dead players in AI
- @founderengineer co-founder of abliteration ai talking about building unrestricted ai
- Ahmad Osman founder @OsmanticAI talking about open models & the hardware needed to run it
- Suddu Head of Data and AI @Plaid talking about the company's latest breakthroughs in AI
- @BernAceituno co-founder of StackAI (acq. by Asana) discussing what it's like building capable enterprise agents
- @efarrellgregory Fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation talking about Sinomodernity
- Aden Barton head of evals @mercor talking about the company's latest report on the US economy
- Masumi Reynders co-founder and COO of Majestic Labs talking about the "memory wall" and what Majestic is working on
Incredibly interesting and exciting.
interpretability might be the most important scientific problem in the world right now, as I don't think we can solve alignment if we don't know what we're building. I think I have good news about it. I co-authored early work in mechanistic interpretability at OpenAI and came away pessimistic, because neural networks appeared to fold into arbitrary tangled knots. years later, I started openai's first large-scale automated interpretability project, finding about 2% of neurons legible with the primitive tools we had
with modern agentic tools and a much closer look, the picture looks totally different. the vast majority in models up to trillions of parameters are legible, and their circuits beautiful. many famous examples of tangled neurons turned out to be misunderstood. The roadblocks I expected mostly aren't there. I now think ambitious interpretability will be solved by the time we need it most, and possibly quite soon, as automated scientists keep improving. it may be a bitter lesson for interpretability: the simple thing, at absurd scale, works
already-clean.goodfire.com/
Great for NY!
And, of course, worth noting Canada is going even further with a ~$200M investment into a quantum data centre with Xanadu in Toronto. We can keep ramping up our quantum investments to ensure we play a critical part of this global supply chain.
When the public invests in new tech, the public should benefit.
That’s why our investment in a Quantum Fabrication Lab at NYU includes a first-of-its-kind agreement to give the city seats on the board and a share of the revenue from the lab — all while making our city the quantum capital of the world.
We’re creating a new national model for economic development that gives working people a say and a stake.
Jaxson Khan retweeted
The stop-motion animation work behind LAIKA’s WILDWOOD (2026) is absolutely insane.
136 handcrafted sets, over 200 practical puppets and 49 animators working across 231 weeks, with some shots producing just 1–4 seconds of animation per week.
@LAIKAStudios #Wildwood, #LAIKA_partner
Testifying at the House of Commons committee studying AI's impact on Canadian democracy. We discussed AI state capacity, evaluation and testing of models, and a proposed global technology stability board.
Jaxson Khan retweeted
I am at @Mila_Quebec for the day. DM me if you are here and want to chat about AI research automation and agent societies.
New AI council for Canada announced.
Prime Minister Carney launches new National Council on Artificial Intelligence: pm.gc.ca/en/news/news-releas…
Jaxson Khan retweeted
We'll be spending a lot more time trying to understand the outputs of language models. A few thoughts, tips & tricks:
Writing. Something I've had success with: Ask your LLM to explain something in ASD-STE100, it's a controlled language specification originally developed for aerospace maintenance documentation. LLMs well-versed in this language and it comes with heavy constraints on clean writing style that I often find a lot more readable. Sometimes I've tried to soften it a bit e.g. ask for "80% of the way to ASD-STE100" because the spec is quite stringent. But even better:
Diagrams / images. Instead of writing, ask your LLM to create a diagram. These can be a lot easier to process, parse, and understand. But even better:
Web pages. Ask for output "in HTML" to get a beautiful, interactive webpage. LLMs are getting really good at frontend and can create beautiful experiences, animations, etc. But even better:
Explainer videos. The output format I am most bullish on is fully custom / bespoke explainer videos generated on any arbitrary topic. Experiment with things like "Create a 3b1b style video explainer on X. Use my ElevenLabs API key for audio narration". (you'd need an API key for the latter or you can ask your LLM to find you decent free alternatives that use your local compute). This is actually starting to work!
In summary:
- As LLMs get better, they will do more and more of the legwork autonomously, and a lot more of our work will rise up the abstractions into oversight and understanding.
- Luckily, LLMs can help here too because as intelligence and code are increasingly abundant, you can ask for large, custom, discardable software artifacts (e.g. web apps, video explainers) that would have never made sense to create before. Push the boundaries here and you'll be surprised.
Extremely cool -- and Canadian!
1/ The US launched America(.gov) yesterday and it got a bunch of buzz. It's an "AI front door" to 29,000 federal websites.
Canadians can do the same or better! I was curious, so overnight I built Canada.ca 2.0 (with Claude)
Ask in plain English or French, get answers only from federal government pages.
canadafuturegov.ca
4/ Note -- It's an independent concept, not a government site.
No account, no ads, no stored questions. As a demo, it's limited to 15 questions a day.
Digital Transformation Canada has the mandate for this work going forward. This website is a sketch of where it could start.
canadafuturegov.ca
P.S. this may have loads of errors and is meant as food for thought! Thanks for understanding.
4/ Note -- It's an independent concept, not a government site. No account, no ads, no stored questions. As a demo, it's limited to 15 questions a day.
Digital Transformation Canada has the mandate for this work going forward. This website is a sketch of where it could start.
canadafuturegov.ca
P.S. this may have loads of errors and is meant as food for thought! Thanks















