Maxwell Adam

I'm an undergraduate at The University of Melbourne studying neuroscience and math

Melbourne, Australia
max@v3rv.com
github.com/bfpill

Research

Interpreting Complexity - Singular Learning Theory for Interpretability - March 2025

Self-led research into using Singular Learning Theory (SLT) ideas for interpretability. Introduce novel interpretability and SLT tools. Published findings on LessWrong. Currently a first author on a related full paper in progress with collaborators. 🔗 Read the post, or the Twitter Thread

A Contrastive Analysis of Features in Twin Toy Transformers that (play) Chess - November 2024

I trained SAE's and found very interpretable features in models trained to predict legal chess moves! Features interactive neuron browsers for exploring the models and interactive graphs, all written in typescript. Models trained using Torch. 🔗 Read the paper

Projects:

Evolutionary algorithms for your website - Python, React

Over two days, I built a tool which let a language model-driven evolutionary algorithm mutate your website's stylesheet to maximize customer engagement.🔗 Read the writeup

NotionAiOS Python, Typescript - 2023

A ChatGPT plugin experiment. Allowed ChatGPT to use Notion as a filesystem and iteratively write larger codebases. The user could interact with the generated code and download it as a zip, as well as share it to a public Notion database of generated projects.
🔗 View on GitHub

Experience

Zendesk, Melbourne Aus — Engineering Intern

September 2022 - March 2023

Developed and maintained Zendesk Apps CLI and App Store infrastructure. Implemented features used by thousands of developers globally. Worked in an agile team environment with distributed deployment pipelines.

Education

The University of Melbourne, Aus — Bachelor of CS February 2024 - Present

RMIT University, Melbourne Aus — Bachelor of CS February 2023 - November 2023

Acton Boxborough High School, Boston Ma — HS Diploma 2020 - 2022

Graduated High School in America. Took Honors Physics, Honors Calculus, College Level Java and Unix/Linux Shell Scripting.

Technical Skills

I do all of my research in Python, and have extensive experience building interactive web apps and tooling in Typescript and Javascript. I also have written lots of code in C, C++, and Java. I've been programming for 6+ years.