Aden Power Not you?

Iliad Intensive

October 2026

The most important things

Before
Join the Iliad Discord and check you can see #intensive-october. That is where you post any material you need to share with participants. If you can't see it, tell Leonard (@leonardbereska on Discord).
During
At 17:10, make sure everyone fills out the feedback form.
After
Fill out the end-of-day log: rate the day and tell us anything that went wrong.
Fill out Who stood out: name anyone who made a positive impression.
  • Questions about pay, travel, logistics or materials: see the FAQ.

66 project proposals are open for review. Stars, a sentence, or both. Read them.

Your days

Multi-agent Dynamics Fri 23 Oct, leading 27 responses · energy 3.5/5
Overall +0.26 better than expected
Content +0.30 better than expected
Clarity 0.00 as expected
Motivation +0.37 better than expected
Exercises -0.09 as expected n = 23
Readings +0.20 as expected n = 10
Other activities +0.13 as expected n = 23
Pace +0.26 too fast
Difficulty +0.15 about right
Novelty +0.67 mostly new
Read what they wrote28
Worked well8
  • The mix of various speakers and the intuitive approach
  • I liked the subject matter of James' lecture the most. All 5 talks were impressive.
  • It was helpful that different lecturers have their own expertise. Topics are various but coherent. Interesting topic and discussions.
  • I enjoyed the multi-agent RL talk!
  • i loved that the day was so well curated with a coherent programme±
  • Final discussion
  • The exercises with accompanying reading material really helped solidify my understanding today
  • It was best when they slowed down for questions and encouraged audience engagement.
Would improve14
  • The remote speaker was a bit hard to understand, both physically and content-wise.
  • Bad slides, not helpful or informative to read them during the lecture. Better preparation overall would be nicer, the speaker just read off the slides all the time and they were not written well.
  • Not teaching related, but the room was so hot today. Some fans would help a lot
  • I thought this was a really interesting topic, and particularly enjoyed James Sykes' talk. I would have really liked to see more through the lens of condensed matter physics. I'm now significantly more interested in this topic than where I started.
  • More exercises
  • Very good set of lectures. The lectures were organized well and covered a lot of topics. The lectures were clear and the discussion session a tthe end was especially good..
  • Today's lectures are very nice, and the exercises are good too. Nothing that I can think of for improvement, just wish today is not the last day of the week where we get a bit tired.
  • The online talk was a little confusing and very detailed
  • Make sure beforehand mic and the screen work.
  • I was a bit under the weather today, hence missed some things, my main gripe would be it wouldve been nice to have more of a concrete connection between the talks/cross references. But it was in general very nice.
  • two of the talks (James and the second one by Aden) went a bit too deep on the formalism and maths and specific examples and not enough about basic formalism (the Aden's first talk was great! but did not prepare us for James) and general ideas.
  • Not much, maybe slightly less lecture time. Also fix the AC
  • The lecture needs to spend more time getting us familiar with the notation before sprinting through successive math equations. It is hard to context-switch day after day between different conventions across different fields and coherently follow things. I think comprehension would be greatly improved with just a tiny slowdown in the beginning of the lecture.
  • I thought it would have been perhaps been better to start with the real world examples and discussion around them earlier in the day. Having it before the theory stuff would have put the theory in more context I think and perhaps easier to follow.
Changed my mind6
  • I learned about deal-making - fascinating!
  • This seems like a more interesting topic than I realized.
  • This subfield seems particularly new that there are not well established theories based on math or physics at this moment mostly empirical and engineering which could be seen as open opportunities or exploratory. An important field which could benefit the most from contributions in cognitive science or computational psychology aspects imo. Exploring with RL concept was particularly intriguing.
  • Enjoyed thinking about game theory, might investigate further
  • I changed my views on studying cooperation and altruism as emergent and defined behaviors in systems. I thought it had to be a product of behavior but I am now more open to mechanistic or training-based answers.
  • Interested in what the orthogonality thesis means. Realizing I may have misunderstood it.
[E.1]Debate and Provably Safe AI Mon 26 Oct, leading 33 responses · energy 4.0/5
Overall +0.42 better than expected n = 31
Content +0.42 better than expected n = 31
Clarity -0.10 as expected n = 31
Motivation +0.32 better than expected n = 31
Exercises -0.03 as expected n = 31
Readings +0.11 as expected n = 28
Other activities 0.00 as expected n = 30
Pace +0.10 about right n = 31
Difficulty +0.26 too hard n = 31
Novelty +1.00 mostly new n = 31
Read what they wrote41
Worked well13
  • Aden is very engaging and knowledgable.
  • I liked the discussion on complexity theory, but I would have liked to gain more intuition from it.
  • Small post-reading debate among fellow students
  • liked the presentation and the exercises.
  • The handout was nice to reinforce the more difficult proofs
  • exercises and discussion
  • The exercises and demos were very illustrative
  • Today felt very interactive!
  • I thought Aden's style of presentation was very good, the exercises felt relevant. The pacing was perfect imo.
  • The reading
  • The day was well structured and planned.
  • Aden's enthusiasm and willingness to teach! I really liked the exercise of reading the papers and recording at each step how our beliefs changed. It was a simple, almost gimmicky thing but it helped frame the reading!
  • The theory was very well explained
Would improve18
  • I thought the lectures were good and the topic was interesting--I think I had trouble following just because my energy was low. But I am super grateful for the material and will look back on it at a later date.
  • The mathematical formalism was interesting and I'm glad I saw it, but I'm not sure if it helped me to better understand how agent debate works. This picture gave me a different understanding of what debate is (in terms of complexity theory) but this didn't change my empirical understanding of it. I'm new to the topic though, so I might have missed something.
  • It was quite excellent! Perhaps speak a bit more slowly with less filler words like "uhm" and "like", but overall I like Aden a lot.
  • The lectures are overall quite nice. Probably explaining at a slower pace would help for those of us who are not familiar with the topics.
  • A little more details on how to actually implement debate in training
  • The lecture was good. The content gave a good overview of the topic.
  • I'd trim away the proofs, use more figures, and begin the lecture with the Alignment motivation.
  • The connection to how this would be implemented in practice or what are the practical implications could have been clearer. But still very interesting topics.
  • The lecturer made some mistakes that confused people
  • A bit less time introducing complexity theory, a bit more time on later topics, especially the prover-estimator debate towards the end.
  • Fix a couple mistakes in the slides that created confusion
  • Maybe a bit more emphasis on the connection between theory and empirics for debate would have been helpful today.
  • Only a small wobble on notation
  • Maybe some more preparation for the presentation
  • I wish the topics were better split between the theory and empirics of debate as a means for scalable oversight. The theory is just so far from how it's actually implemented that it is jarring to go back and forth.
  • Some of notation was confusing as presented, but it was eventually clarified in the QnA.
  • Despite his enthusiasm and passion, Aden seemed a bit out of his depth on this day. I would suggest improving the slides and the presentation in general by doing a more standard definition-example-theorem-proof kind of presentation (many slides didn't have definitions, theorems didn't list assumptions clearly etc) and then of course prepare more what is going to be said. I would suggest presenting and thinking of examples of the different classes and present them immediately. There _must_ be traditional and effective ways of presenting this material! Also I would totally introduce and rely on the Turing machine as the backbone of all this
  • The theory was nice, but the connections to how debate is implemented in practice were not fully clear to me, i.e. how this formalism translates to the way it is done in practice/how these are useful.
Changed my mind10
  • I am more amenable to thinking debate is a viable option.
  • I did not realise there were so many complexity classes
  • Didn't know about the debate approach to safety; seems immediately-applicable.
  • complexity theory has interesting points on AI safety, which is cool
  • I am really excited about ai safety via debate+scalable oversight and would love to pursue it. I have a strong background in computability theory, decision theory, and logic so this approach to ai safety seems very interesting to me
  • I am a bit more open to the idea that debate and estimation have a place in AI Safety rather than being pipe dreams.
  • I think debate is a more valuable research area than previous.
  • Debate is more important than I thought
  • I am a little less skeptical about debate working as an AI Safety technique, though not yet convinced.
  • i didn't know debate had such hardcore CS-backbone! Of the hard maths we saw so far, it seems the one with the clearest application to scaling and safety in practice (even though the connection between theory and practice is still kinda loose)
[D.4]Agent Foundations Tue 27 Oct, leading 26 responses · energy 3.5/5
Overall +0.25 better than expected n = 24
Content +0.25 better than expected n = 24
Clarity +0.17 as expected n = 24
Motivation +0.08 as expected n = 24
Exercises -0.22 as expected n = 23
Readings -0.36 below expected n = 22
Other activities +0.10 as expected n = 21
Pace +0.04 about right n = 24
Difficulty -0.08 about right n = 24
Novelty +0.75 mostly new n = 24
Read what they wrote22
Worked well6
  • The conversations about Agent foundations and where it stood in relation to the rest of the field were very enlightening. Aden does a really good job explaining.
  • The discussion part
  • Aden's best day! loved all of the content he presented
  • I really like Aden's pedagogical style.
  • The toy models/games given during the lectures really helped illustrate concepts around agents
  • Aden's enthusiasm for the topics is contagious. Even those topics that I came in somewhat uninspired about, he helped me stay motivated.
Would improve11
  • Very good presentation, can be more structured.
  • I wouldve liked this day to be a bit more focused on the different research agendas, it felt a bit rushed as a whole. All the topics where interesting, i just wouldve liked more time on the foundations.
  • A lot of terminology was introduced for intuitive concepts which eventually became hard to remember and follow. Not sure if there is a way to reduce that, but that would have helped.
  • I really enjoyed the conversations we had about modeling things as agents versus actually beleiving they are agents. It would have been nice if we could have had that conversation a bit longer.
  • There is not enough time for the exercises. For me, personally, it would for example be more useful to have discussion time, explaining topics we just learned to one another.
  • this was super great! the guest lecture was so so (too slow to build the definitions, and not enough time to talk through the actual result and relevance of it) (that's not why all my scores are not max)
  • I would like to see a clearer connection between existing theory and practice if possible.
  • I did not like the guest lecture. Getting bogged down in details before explaining what it matters. Foundations need solutions on lower philosophical level, not more formulas. Also, first lecture didn't seem to know what it's talking about in the end. Lob theorem is not a "subfield" of foundations, and tiling is not inextricably tied to this theorem.
  • I wish this day were earlier in the intensive, particularly before multi-agent day. I think it also would have been good to clarify more why we care so much about copies and how we think about copies.
  • The lectures are good, just like yesterday. A lot of materials feel too theoretical in nature, and it would be nice to have hands on coding session to validate the concepts we learn and to see if they are really useful in practice
  • i think the guest lecture didnt really match the flow of the rest of the day and threw everything off
Changed my mind4
  • The embedded agents framework seems like a promising research idea. I didn't realize it was so underdeveloped.
  • I especially liked the final part, and I learned that some deep philosophical thought experiments have now become real-life problems, e.g. issues with perfect copies of agents.
  • Agent foundations is quite close to part of my research and the call of action for embedded agency was quite motivating
  • I felt like I gained a greater appreciation for why philosophy of the self or of the mind are important in AI Safety and reasoning about models.
Other thoughts1
  • i think it would have been good to have a real technical day on reinforcement learning and how it applies to LLMs in particular (exploration and gradient hacking etc)
Heuristic Arguments and Verification Wed 28 Oct, leading 26 responses · energy 3.9/5
Overall +0.05 as expected n = 22
Content -0.05 as expected n = 22
Clarity +0.05 as expected n = 22
Motivation +0.05 as expected n = 22
Exercises 0.00 as expected n = 17
Readings +0.10 as expected n = 21
Other activities +0.13 as expected n = 8
Pace -0.23 about right n = 22
Difficulty 0.00 about right n = 22
Novelty +0.64 mostly new n = 22
Read what they wrote17
Worked well3
  • I suppose Q&A does not count for this feedback form -- but if it counts, it was really good and enlightening.
  • The talk was good and useful
  • The morning lecture was very helpful!
Would improve10
  • Make some of the lecture less vague
  • the morning talk was pretty ineffective. it was not really clear to me what was trying to be communicated beyond "we should be able to understand the outputs better than simply observing them". talking to Aden and reading helped me to see a bit better what is the ARC research project.
  • nothing
  • today was great, i wouldve liked some more intuition to start the reading, but that is a minor detail
  • I wish the ARC lecture was more explicit if possible.
  • Nice, maybe a bit more help with the actual arguments ARC uses would be helpful. Otherwise interesting!
  • The ARC talk didn't really have any concrete details and the presentation could have gone into the mathematics in more details. The rest of the day was mostly self reading.
  • The lecture in the morning on ARC overview and the exercise in the evening were useful. For the lecture I would consider including more real examples - say explaining in detail one of the examples that we later had in the exercise. Maybe this is not possible considering the time limitation. Overall there are no complaints.
  • Not entirely clear on the specifics of this research program.
  • Not much. I think the ARC research agenda is interesting and I was glad to learn more about it.
Changed my mind3
  • I really do not understand how ARC thinks that ambitious mec interp is going to work in general. Even very simple models are very very very hard to analyse.
  • Even though interpretability was not explicitly mentioned, the framing given by the ARC speaker makes me believe more than it would be useful. If we can use the interpretation of a part of the network to simplify part of the task of predicting the output, we are one step closer to understanding, and half a step closer to tuning/controlling for alignment.
  • Was glad to get an idea of what they were doing at ARC.
Other thoughts1
  • I think the 'worked better than i expected' style question is functionally useless given that you have no prior on my expectations. a simple 'how did you find x' on a 1-5 scale would probably be more informative en masse.

The day

10:00 Lecture starts
12:30 Lunch at Mox
13:30 Afternoon session
17:10 Feedback form
17:30 Day ends. Dinner

Resources

Elsewhere