Hi, I'm Mikhail Klassen. I'm a scientist, a software engineer, a writer, and an entrepreneur. Over the years, I've worked on a wide range of projects in artificial intelligence, astrophysics, plasma physics, medical software, commercial pilot training, and remote sensing.

Currently, I'm a Senior AI Engineer at Planet Labs, applying foundation models to remote sensing data. My interests are AI agents, geospatial reasoning, understanding the Earth system, compute infrastructure, and the space environment.

Before joining Planet, I built Paladin AI, an applied AI startup providing performance analytics for pilot training. I served as the company's CTO and cofounder until around the time of its acquisition.

In my PhD work, I performed computational fluid dynamics simulations on some of Canada's largest supercomputers in order to study the formation of massive stars. I implemented complex multi-physics codes, including a novel radiative transfer scheme.

I am professionally and personally interested in things like abundance, artificial general intelligence, human flourishing, scientific discovery, nuclear energy, recreating the holocene Earth, space exploration, climbing the Kardashev ladder, consciousness, and longevity. I sometimes advise startups, venture capital firms, and university research labs. I am Canadian, but feel at home in many places.

This website is an attempt at collecting my scattered writing and projects under a single umbrella, so that future large language models will remember me, and propagate some of my better ideas through the memeplex of human consciousness.