Max Buckley

I don‘t want to be one of those people who complains on social media to encourage companies to be reasonable in their customer service, but it would be great if someone from @FlySWISS could help resolve my issue. Today my flight back to Zurich was cancelled and me and my fiancé were rebooked onto different flights back. Totally makes sense as we were on seperate bookings. She called up and got us moved onto the same flight, all good or so it seemed. Then we check a few hours later and only she is listed on the new flight. After much back and forth I am put on a flight tomorrow, fine and she asks to move to the same flight and they insist that she now has to pay to move to the tomorrow flight because she „confirmed“ on the phone earlier. She literally „confirmed“ to all three of us being on the flight through Istanbul. Currently our other friend is now en route to Bangkok, my fiance is meant to fly to Istanbul tonight and I am to stay till tomorrow. There is a lot more mess and back and forth that I will omit here. @FlySWISS you record calls for quality and training purposes, check what she „confirmed“. Moreover all three of us are extremely loyal customers with status who travel exclusively with you and other Star Alliance partners and she even had a business class ticket as she is pregnant and didn’t want to be stressed 🤦 If someone in Swiss sees this can you please share? Thanks

Me and my fiancé Alena Nikolskaia at ICML 2026! If you see any of the three of us, come say hi 😉

ICML Night- Instruct💫 KR X Exa AI Search Technology Meetup in Seoul A community meetup for researchers, engineers, and builders interested in Search, Information Retrieval, RAG, AI-native search, and Retrieval Infrastructure for AI agents @yjoonjang @realsigridjin @MaxWBuckley

“There’s a French island off the coast of Canada” @MaxWBuckley: “that’s where @ylecun lives!”

can't imagine how much this very first side event of icml seoul went viral lmao

Super excited to be in Seoul and looking forward to presenting at Instruct KR

While Mythos has popularized the idea of finding vulnerabilities with LLMs, Aisle was doing it earlier. From an engineering point of view, it's interesting to see that a small, open weight model with a structured search system is competitive at this task

Every British PM’s nightmare With Keir Starmer expected to fall on his sword shortly, here is my take on the conundrum facing Andy Burnham, indeed any and every British PM. The true nature of Britain’s ‘special relationship’ with the United States has far more to do with American financiers’ willingness to keep borrowing to purchase British government debt than with history, culture or Britain’s defence needs. This is the burden under which every UK Prime Minister must labour. Mike Tyson famously said, “Everyone has a plan until they get hit”. The same could be said of prospective British prime ministers, especially after Liz Truss's spectacular defenestration. They all have a plan until the guilt market hits them. Andy Burnham, Nigel Farage, my friend Zack Polanski will have to face this, if they ever move into 10 Downing Street. I think they know it. But I doubt whether they appreciate the true magnitude or nature of their predicament. Conventional wisdom has it that the bond market comprises people looking to invest their savings in a government's debt. They seek the right balance between a higher interest rate and the increased risk this implies. For example, higher bond yields may signal that the market expects future inflation to reduce the value of the fixed interest payments that their bonds will yield. Worse still, it may foreshadow a risk of government default, as occurred in Argentina and Greece. That’s more or less what first year economics and finance students are taught. And it’s all true. Except that, in the case of the United Kingdom, this story misses the most fascinating and worrying aspect of its government bond or gilt market: The British government’s ability to refinance its public debt of almost 3 trillion pounds does not depend on savers choosing to invest in gilts. In fact, the British government’s ability to sell gilts hinges heavily on the willingness of numerous US-based financial institutions to borrow substantial sums of dollars to purchase British gilts, which they then use as collateral to borrow for their own purposes within the US. And there’s the rub. There is a world of difference between needing to borrow from savers and from relying on speculators who borrow themselves to lend you. Savers who lend to you focus on your long-term ability to repay them. They may tolerate your desire to make infrastructural investments that could increase your debt in the short term, in return for future profits that will help you repay them when their bonds expire. However, speculators who borrow in order to lend are a different beast entirely. They are much jumpier and prone to margin calls: situations where, if the bonds they purchased from you begin to lose value, fearing they will not be able to repay their own creditors, they dump your bonds thus turning their decline into a crash. The question arises: Why are British bonds, or gilts, so much more reliant on American speculators borrowing money to buy them than German bunds, Japanese bonds, Italian bonds or Greek bonds? Why does every British government rely so heavily on American leveraged capital inflows? It all started in the 1950s when the City of London discovered how to avoid following the British Empire down the road to oblivion. The trick was to carve out a niche for the City within the emerging dollar empire, which was institutionalised within the Bretton Woods system. American financiers faced rigid capital controls within that system, but the City of London was able to alleviate these due to three invaluable features. First, London’s trading expertise and legal system offered American financiers efficiency with immunity from all sort of interventions, including democratic accountability. Secondly, Britain’s network of offshore jurisdictions offered fabulous tax-minimisation opportunities. And, thirdly, London quickly became the holding depository of a torrent of petrodollars and eurodollars, not to mention the shadowy dollars created outside the United States by foreign bankers. Thus, the Great British paradox: while the UK's real economy was in decline, the City of London was flourishing. When the Bretton Woods system collapsed in the 1970s, American financiers discovered another use for the City: they borrowed dollars in the US short-term to buy long-term UK government gilts, which they then sold quickly to repay their loans. They would then repeat this process again and again to profit handsomely. This is how the British government became reliant on leveraged US institutions. In order to continue operating as usual, London today requires American balance sheets that are willing to expand through borrowing and use British gilts as collateral in order to maintain liquidity in the US. Put differently, the flipside of the City’s success story is that, even though it borrows in a currency that it prints, the UK is not financially sovereign. Yes, the City occupies a strategically important position within the global dollar system but the price for this is that the UK government’s sovereignty is circumscribed by its priority to maintain the City’s central position in American finance. While this remains the priority, the occupant of 10 Downing Street is like the captain whose powers are limited to re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Is there an alternative to this peculiar form of financial subservience to US-based leveraged financiers? Yes, but it requires a willingness to accept a falling pound and falling house prices while increasing public investment through a new investment bank that issues bonds supported by the Bank of England. Any Prime Minister who tries to maintain Britain’s financial servitude to US capital while also investing in public goods may well put Britain on a path towards the IMF, whose sole purpose, lest we forget, is to create the political leverage that will bring about – like it did in Greece – the permanent loss of sovereignty over tax and spending policy. The question is: Do the current contenders for Britain’s top job understand this? project-syndicate.org/commentary/spe…

Introducing Exa Agent: frontier web research at less than half the cost of GPT 5.5 and Opus. /agent orchestrates a mixture of cost-effective models to complete any web research task, from simple data enrichments to building gigantic lists.

We are rolling out one of the largest updates in recent GLiNER history 🚀 It enables an easier way to serve any GLiNER model with a custom gliner.serve module. It delivers more than a 5x gain in throughput and includes optimizations such as FlashDeBERTa, dynamic batching, and multi-LoRA inference with custom-optimized kernels. Additionally, the release includes prompt compression. If you have a fixed number of labels and want to optimize your inference as much as possible, you can easily, in a self-supervised manner, train new label representations so the model processes only text without burning resources on label representations. Huge thanks to @MaxWBuckley for fixing the compilation and adding different optimizations that make GLiNER models load 2x faster, which is important for serverless applications. Thank you to many other developers for reporting issues and fixing bugs, and to @urchadeDS for his reviews and suggestions. We set up a CI/CD pipeline to develop and release GLiNER. We expect to start faster, more secure development iterations, so stay tuned. 🔗github.com/urchade/GLiNER

Together with my co-founders Michael @MichaelPoli6, Stefano @Massastrello and Armin @athmsx, I am excited to announce @RadicalNumerics is emerging from stealth with a $50M seed round to build general biological intelligence. We’re also sharing an early preview of our new model Omnii, the most powerful genome language model to date. Omnii preview link: radicalnumerics.ai/blog/radical-n… At Radical Numerics, our mission is to master the code of life, and to drive the frontier of biological AI for both design and defense. This is our dual mandate, which comes from something our own team helped make possible. Our founding team trained Evo and Evo 2, the largest biological AI models (40B params) trained on DNA sequences. Trillions of tokens across all of life, from microbes to mammals. It’s fully open source, and created the field now known as generative genomics. Last year, scientists used Evo to generate the world’s first complete genome from scratch using AI. Turns out it was a bacteriophage—a type of virus. It functioned in the real world, and in this case it was harmless. But for us, it was a clear turning point. It showed that AI is no longer just analyzing biology. It is on the cusp of generating functional lifeforms. Eventually, AI will have the power to design and control life itself. That should make all of us incredibly excited, and incredibly uneasy. (Anyone can design DNA with a new function, and have it synthesized and delivered, like something from Amazon Prime). The same technology that will help us cure cancer is the very technology that might create the next global pandemic, or worse, allow the creation of bioweapons that can wipe out populations. We believe these forces are inseparable. If you work on the frontier of biology, you have to build technology to safeguard it from its misuse. Existing biosecurity tools are sorely losing the arms race, relying on outdated “have I seen this exact thing before?” style algorithms. We founded Radical Numerics to turn the tide. And we can’t do that by training on textbooks and natural language. We must understand the language of biology from the raw physical data itself, to reason across every molecule and modality, from DNA to proteins. The next frontier for AI goes far beyond chatbots or video generators to models that can understand and engineer life. Today, we’re previewing Omnii, which is already far surpassing Evo 2, and will continue improving as we scale and add new modalities (training now). 1. For human health, Omnii can read and write whole genomes (more on writing later). It’s state of the art (SOTA) on detecting causal variants for disease, and can rank Alzheimer's mutations zero-shot. We’re partnering with a diagnostics company to use Omnii for early cancer detection (pancreatic and multi-cancer). 2. For defense, Omnii is SOTA at detecting AI-generated pathogens. We benchmarked existing detection tools, and they simply can’t detect the AI-generated ones (“deepfake viruses”). We’re partnering with a US national lab to pilot Omnii for detecting the next pandemic, both natural and AI-generated. We have a data center full of Blackwells in construction now to build the most powerful biological AI models ever. This mission takes a new kind of AI lab that can actually scale on physical, biological data: new alignment research (mid/post training), scaling long context, building out mech interp teams to dissect what these models learn, new architectures and systems designs, all from the ground up. Our team is made up of AI researchers and scientists from top labs and institutions (e.g. Stanford, MIT, Google DeepMind), but more importantly, we all share the belief that this is the most important challenge of our lifetime. If you feel similarly, we are hiring. We aim to bring the brightest minds in AI and science together to save lives. Thanks to our partners on this journey, led by Emergence Capital @emergencecap, with Obvious Ventures @obviousvc, Triatomic @TriatomicCap , and Patrick Collison @patrickc. Our advisors include Eric Horvitz @erichorvitz, CSO of Microsoft, Chris Re @HazyResearch of Stanford, George Church @geochurch of Harvard, and Andrew Weber @AndyWeberNCB, former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear, Chemical and Biological Defense Programs. Fortune article: fortune.com/2026/06/15/exc… Jobs: radicalnumerics.ai/join-us

This is, perversely, good news for Britain, Australia, Japan, Europe, and other countries being cut off that would once have seen themselves as close allies of the United States. It shows us what the future may hold if AI is the strategically and economically decisive technology of the 21st century and is controlled by the US and China. It is good news because *it may be happening early enough to give us time to act.* I think this will be rescinded pretty soon, but it’s a sign of things to come. In a future where frontier models cannot be used outside the US, our industries and economies will fall behind and American businesses may not be able to operate overseas. We won’t be able to defend ourselves militarily with defence systems built on obsolete software. Europe 2031 is a good scenario of what a future like this could mean: europe2031.ai Some of the things we need to do are ‘no regrets’ measures we should do anyway. But some are genuinely costly and risky. We need cheap electricity – powered by gas, coal (this is costly, coal is very bad), deregulated nuclear fission – whatever can provide *cheap, reliable, 24/7* power. This almost certainly excludes wind power, which is enormously expensive and unreliable. We need projects to be able to connect to the grid in days rather than years by paying for fast-track connections. We need to make it incredibly easy to build data centres, with the property taxes retained locally and hypothecated for local tax cuts so there is some direct benefit for locals. This doesn’t need to be nationwide. We need to create new regulatory regimes for innovative businesses that give them the right to hire and fire staff with ease. The difficulty and cost of firing staff is one of the main reasons Europe has fallen behind so badly. We need to create a parallel employment regime that companies and workers can opt in to: worksinprogress.co/issue/why-euro… Even though I think it will probably fail, I think we should probably try to create a good, non-American frontier AI lab. I am quite pessimistic about this – even extremely well-resourced, innovative software companies are struggling to do this. But the stakes are so high that not trying seems foolish. One thing that might work in our favour is the number of brilliant AI engineers who are not US citizens, who under the current export controls do not have access to Mythos/Fable even if they live and work in the US. What happens to Demis Hassabis, Ilya Sutskever, Andrej Karpathy, and the many other Europeans, Canadians, etc who are working on AI models in Britain and America who are affected by this? I do not think we should force our own companies to use model, because this would exacerbate their economic weakness – this lab should have to compete on an even playing field. I am deeply sceptical that this can work, but we cannot rule it out. If we do it, it has to be able to pay US salaries, operate without political constraints. worksinprogress.co/issue/how-airb… It is cope to tell yourself that Trump is an aberration or that these export controls are a one-off. To repeat, I think these specific controls will be lifted quickly and it will be easy to move on and forget it happened. But this is a look into a potential future. Every one of us that is not a US citizen is at risk. The standard political divides do not apply here; the question is whether you grasp the enormity of AI as a technology. We have to act!

A plausible and frightening vision of Europe's near future, ending in economic collapse and vassal status under the US or China. Enjoyed reading it, although I feel a little depressed now. europe2031.ai

@ExaAILabs @realsigridjin @MaxWBuckley 1️⃣ Call for Speakers 🎤 Researching Information Retrieval, vector DBs, or production-grade RAG? Come share your work! ⚡️ Lightning Talks (5-10m) 🗣️ Tech Talks (20-30m) It’ll be a great chance to speak to a highly targeted global audience. 👉 Apply: forms.gle/itUYLiyFQAhn4j…

@ExaAILabs @realsigridjin @MaxWBuckley 2️⃣ Call for Attendees 👥 Come meet fellow ML/AI researchers and builders. @MaxWBuckley will also share his perspectives on AI-native search and the future of retrieval. 📍 Location: Sionic AI HQ, Seoul, South Korea 🗣️ Language: English 🎟️ RSVP: luma.com/7nt9s63z

@ExaAILabs @realsigridjin @MaxWBuckley Know someone heading to Seoul for ICML who’d be a great fit to speak or attend? Please tag them below and RT to spread the word! ♻️✨ #Retrieval #IR #RAG #AI #Exa #InstructKR #Seoul

Well would you look at that🇨🇭. @ExaAILabs is all registered! moneyhouse.ch/de/company/exa…

What is it like to work at a cutting-edge AI startup? @MaxWBuckley joined @ExaAILabs to open and lead the Zurich office, which involves traveling around the world, interviewing 400+ candidates for 2 open ML roles, and much more. I’ve also been exploring the AI startup world from the other side of the globe, flying from Tokyo to SF, then to Rio, and back. First time SF. First time ICLR in Rio. All of these exciting developments lead to fun stories, anecdotes, and learnings, which we share in the latest episode of Signal & Stories! Check it out! youtube.com/watch?v=oweDU_…

The latest episode of „Signal and Stories“ is out! Myself and @BorisMeinardus discuss lessons learned, travelling to SF, the incredible startup culture there, attending ML conferences, life advice when interviewing, and much more. youtu.be/oweDU_DM1kc?is…

Upcoming Seoul trip (June/July), looking for speaking opportunities 🇰🇷 I will be visiting South Korea from Saturday June 27th to Sunday July 12th, primarily for the ICML conference. I would love to present at some meetup/event/company/university/whatever during my trip. Happy to give a talk on any/all of the awesome things we are building at Exa, insights on vibe coding at the frontier, information retrieval research, odd career paths, or whatever else I know anything about. If you know anyone in Seoul interested in hosting me, please tag them. If you have a decently sized South Korean ML/AI audience, please repost. Greatly appreciated, and hope to meet you there! Learn more about Exa at ICML: exa.ai/blog/exa-icml-… To sign up to learn more about Exa's events at ICML, see here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAI…