My name is Taha Ashtiani.
I am a human. I enjoy spending time with my cat, my friends, my dear girlfriend, and also on things like prediction markets, poker, fermi math, meta-rationality, and AI alignment research. I live in Toronto, Canada 🇨🇦 ❤️
Few other things about me:
- [2026] I started Polytubes.xyz with a simple mission: achieve verifiable confidence in Prediction Markets data via 1) correctness and 2) coverage – my thesis currently is that this should be possible via scalable oversight and constitution techniques. It's a long term project, but personally quite important to me. Also built monitoring-the-situation.wtf which branched off of this.
- [2026] I founded my own AI consultancy Practical.sh (book an intro 30 mins consultation with me here - I like talking to people and learning about their problems)
- [2025] I led AI projects at Datatonic, closely working with technical and commercial teams at Google. My job was AI architecture (i.e. Harness Engineering) and also leading ML engineers on projects we ran for: Sesame Street (their content production team), Canaccord Genuity (wealth management with 100B AUM), Verisk (NASDAQ:VRSK), MLS (Major League Soccer), and Sovos.com (Tax Compliance). They gave me an "LLM Oracle" award at the company :)
- [2023] I spent the summer of 2023 jailbreaking LLMs and which got me a Y Combinator interview for building cloud infrastructure tooling wrapping APIs at scale (docker/terraform/kubernetes), and also worked on ai safety projects (e.g. gradient_hacking) and engaged in safety debate for many months at the height of it.
- [2021] I led data infra and mlops at Flinks. I built the data pipelines serving trillions of rows of financial data streaming on GCP and ML predictions pipelines on top that served majority of fintech industry in Canada (most notably powering Wealthsimple: if you sign up today your credit card data will likely go through the pipelines I built and scaled). Flinks raised a $103M Series B.
- Most of my core engineering skills I have gained through years of hacking hardware. I also know startups very well. My training in university has been in CS and math.
Over the years I've had many mentors, teachers, and managers who have influenced my thinking, worldviews and decision making. Arguably Charlie Awebery my coach and teacher, and also David Chapman whose writing has been nothing short of transformational for me. And Varun Godbole as a mentor who's been world class at deep learning and helped build code-gen at Google before LLMs were a thing. And some people who I don't know directly but from the far have always really enjoyed reading about their work: Gwern, Nate Soares, Scott Alexander, and many more.
Contact: taha.m.ashtiani@gmail.com · LinkedIn