I am the Head of Curriculum Development at Iliad, responsible for the content of the Iliad Intensive. Previously, I did a PhD at the University of Amsterdam working on AI Safety and Alignment, and specifically safety risks of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). I also worked on abstract multivariate information theory and equivariant deep learning. https://langleon.github.io/
Leon Lang
Karma: 2,505
There is no or little ‘real-world friction’.
Data collection might be such a friction.
It’s great to see a renaissance of OG alignment research happening!
Congrats on getting Tsimerman on the advisory board! Best if luck with the journal <3
Typically decisions are communicated roughly one week after the deadline.
Iliad Education Roles: Creating the World’s Best Alignment Research Courses
You can always submit a new application. We evaluate the newest one.
Announcing: Iliad’s New 2026 Fellowships
I don’t know the deadline, but afaik the admissions team plans to evaluate applications for the September intensive from Monday onward, so it should still be worthwhile to apply. October and November is open for longer:
Hi Chika! Yes, you can apply, but the Iliad Fellowship is quite competitive, and it is hard to get in without (a) substantial math-heavy research experience or (b) doing the Iliad Intensive beforehand and showing your competence.
The Iliad Intensive is less competitive than the Fellowship but seems to become more competitive over time as well. Predicting this precisely is hard as not only the number of applicants but also the number of open spots is growing quickly.
By early next week!
It seems like we received a second application from you on June 3rd as well.
Hi,
yes, we received an application from you at 22nd of April, for the August Iliad Intensive. We have not yet begun processing those applications and will do so reasonably shortly after the deadline on 22nd of June!
I think karma is composed of more things than post quality. There is also “how much interest is in the topic at the time of posting”, and “how smart do you need to be to understand the post” and “how controversial is the raised opinion”, and “how much do voters themselves benefit from the post appearing polular”. Probably more.
Anywhere on Earth and End of Day. It’s basically the last time at which the clock changes to the next day anywhere on earth.
Hi! We don’t do interviews.
This post and the application form is all information we provide on what we’re looking for. It’s not very gameable: Simply make sure we can easily assess your mathematial expertise, potential research experience, etc.
Announcing: Iliad’s Fall 2026 Programs
There’s a third type of context: Reading up on internal development docs of your company, having access to your chain of thought and all your scaffolding, and generally access to any secret information that is not by default known to other instances of you, including in the form of system prompts and stated user preferences. I think this type of context is relevant and might push everything back into the multi-agent regime that you critique in your post.
You could have the hypothesis that there would be many different AIs for different contexts and skillsets in the past 5 years. But in fact this is not the case. Frontier models are SOTA at (nearly) everything.
I think we’re narrowing down on a crux! I disagree with this statement.
You do in fact need to specialize your AI for the work you want it to perform. That’s why you give it a context in the first place! Without a context it won’t do anything useful.
Frontier models are SOTA at nearly everything, yes, but crucially not simultaneously: For each new task where you evaluate them, you need to provide them a suitable context, usually disjoint from the contexts of all the other tasks.
I think I didn’t swap them! The thing is that
Great post. I think having such a word be commonly known and accepted would probably clarify and improve some of the discourse.