Margot Stakenborg 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

[A.1]AI Alignment Introduction Tue 6 Oct, leading 37 responses · energy 4.0/5
Overall +0.57 better than expected
Content +0.54 better than expected
Clarity +0.57 better than expected
Motivation +0.59 better than expected
Exercises -0.20 as expected n = 25
Readings +0.22 as expected
Other activities +0.54 better than expected n = 35
Pace -0.11 about right
Difficulty -0.30 too easy
Novelty +0.11 an even mix
Read what they wrote59
Worked well21
  • margot is an excellent speaker and the ideas were well communicated
  • The presentation and discussion covered a wide variety of topics.
  • The discussions were very fun!
  • The discussion sessions.
  • The discussions about the readings were edifying. I learned a lot about the history of thought in the AI safety field
  • The group discussions after each reading
  • The discussions
  • Discussion periods and socratic method.
  • I thought the conversations were thought provoking. I got a good idea of the various philosophies around alignment and the open questions people generally struggle with.
  • Margot teached super well!
  • Margot's design and delivery and facilitation of discussion was excellent.
  • Lot's of discussions
  • The readings given are nice and we got to discuss them
  • extremely interesting topics with great explainations.
  • time splitting - the decomposition into various parts such as lecture, reading, discussion was well proportioned
  • Really excellent and enthusiastic instruction. Margot's depth of knowledge and ability to communicate are inspirational. I am meaningfully changed for having attended yesterday.
  • Peer discussion
  • reading and discussion sessions were good. It gave to chance to read at our on pace about things that interest us. Discussions gave an overall impression of all other topics.
  • For this flavor of non-technical content, the alternating reading/small-group/whole-group discussion format was great!
  • Margot's lectures were very nice and allow us to gain a clearer picture of the field and a better understanding of the jargon employed in AI safety. It was very nice to go through the details of the Hugging Face incident. Multi-agent interactions played a crucial role in this context, and this motivated me to develop a theoretical framework to investigate interactions between different agents using Partial Information Decomposition. I already had some ideas about this before the intensive, but this lecture helped me arrive at a clearer picture.
  • passionate, clear speaking, extremely knowledgable and eloquent speaker!!
Would improve20
  • A bit more silence during the reading sessions to increase concentration; the amount of reading was too much, and the continuous talking during the reading sessions was not helpful. Also, the lecturer was highly knowledgeable but it would be better if she just spoke a little slower and took some time to breath :)
  • i liked the quiz maybe we can more/harder quizzes that force us to solve some small hypothetical problems
  • Today was a great day! One thing that was a bit tricky for today was that we were asked to do a bunch of reading, but quickly the instructor would engage in interesting but possibly slightly off topic conversations which made it a bit difficult to concentrate on reading.
  • A lot of the discussion veered quite far from the articles in the slides. Unsure if this was intended but a bit more organization would have been helpful.
  • The discussion needs to be more structured, if we have 25 minutes to go through some posts and discuss them in groups then maybe we ask all groups to post a brief summary 2-5 lines on a forum which is a link everyone else can access. That way so instead of asking each group to speak out what they discussed turn by turn, we just take 5 more minutes to read the forum. Time management seems to be something that can be worked on the above is just one suggestion in this vein.
  • Was very good, maybe some more structured question sections?
  • The questions after these do not ask what my original expectations are and thus contain no information about the quality of the presentation
  • A lot of the reading was hard to parse and used a lot of unnecessary jargon
  • Maybe having less time to read the paper and more time to discuss.
  • More concrete examples and connection to the underlying theory of LLMs, perhaps a step-by-step walkthrough of how particular cases of misalignment might work given what's been covered in the previous intro to ML Engineering class.
  • Reading structure
  • I really enjoyed all the discussions. From what I understand the course will not include that much more of this broad overview of alignment philosophy out there and I would just like to hear more about this.
  • I'd go more into detail on the readings before getting us to read them. Or at least, I feel like today felt quit slow/uneventful as a result of so many 45min reading breaks we had.
  • Encourage the readings more. For instance, encourage people to go to a quiet place to read, and take discussions to another room.
  • More concrete examples of alignments vs misalignments. Motivate with important examples/case studies before introducing them.
  • this was a great session, but I would have liked to do it after having acquired more technical knowledge on the models and the training process.
  • It was great a overview, slightly more quantification would have been nice, e.g., real data to and consequently discuss texts like AI 2027 and Europe 2031 from another critical angle
  • More time for readings
  • It is a bit difficult for me to read papers live and then try to comment on them. With only 25 minutes to spend on each of them, I can never get too far into them.
  • this was amazing! i appreciated the reading+discussing format, found it quite distracting that the speaker would answer attendee questions during the reading time! now i need to chose between reading the material and listening to the very knowledgable clear and passionate speaker. and if i try to read, i am constantly distracted
Changed my mind13
  • I feel a bit sorry for the security people at OpenAI after reading the long Tweet.
  • yes i realized why AI safety research is important and how sometimes you can take a step back from doing math and think about why are we doing this
  • Yes, but the exact topics elude me at the moment.
  • More concerned about ai risk
  • I didn’t change my mind on any subjects today
  • Started having an interest in the economics of AI agents
  • Not really.
  • It does seem like there are predictions that the rationalists (pre-LLM) got wrong. I am interested to hear more about this and will follow up on it.
  • I would have probably kept this section for next week or the week after
  • The possibilities of large AI models misaligning is very high
  • I am slightly more sympathetic to controlling AI and/or slowing its progress than before.
  • I was not aware of gradual disempowerment until today, which very pointedly describes a very reasonable concern one could have even in the more conservative cases of capability growth.
  • i found
Other thoughts5
  • N/a
  • Nothing
  • I did not like "from each table a person speaks vaguely about a vague preceding discussion" format. The readings were not matched against the allotted time. I barely got to the point of long papers I had 25 minutes to read -- and then there was no concrete discussion of that point, so I had to talk to ChatGPT to get at least some well-formed takeaway.
  • Nothing bad about the lecture, it was just the content was too philosophical to follow for me personally especially when I was suffering from the jet lag.
  • can we keep going until 6pm on future days?
[A.2]Alignment in Practice Thu 8 Oct, leading 32 responses · energy 3.9/5
Overall +0.57 better than expected n = 30
Content +0.53 better than expected n = 30
Clarity +0.57 better than expected n = 30
Motivation +0.67 better than expected n = 30
Exercises +0.78 better than expected n = 23
Readings +0.46 better than expected n = 28
Other activities +0.76 better than expected n = 29
Pace +0.03 about right n = 30
Difficulty -0.17 about right n = 30
Novelty +0.50 mostly new n = 30
Read what they wrote38
Worked well12
  • I liked the debate in the end :) Good way to help memorise the various topics.
  • the structure, well partitioned between lecture, reading, discussion
  • The instructor-lead parts were focused and clear.
  • The blue/red team exercise at the end was very helpful to make concrete the techniques we read about
  • The final game we did with Margot was very nice. It helped me touching by hand the challenges of making a model safe and preventing from attacks.
  • great resources and amazing, enthusiastic, enthusiastic, knowledgable, clear, and available speaker
  • The red/blue team exercise was extremely helpful for consolidating concepts introduced today
  • Margot's delivery, selection of material, and engagement with questions, is excellent. The discussions were helpful. The debate was enlightening, and clarified some of the key points of the day.
  • The exercise at the end
  • The exercise at the end
  • The exercise was a lot of fun.
  • I liked the activity at the end. It helped me learn at a deeper level.
Would improve15
  • I found the debate enjoyable and interactive.
  • Fewer topics but a selection of modern/popular topics in more detail.
  • It was great a overview, slightly more quantification would have been nice, e.g., real data to and consequently discuss texts like AI 2027 and Europe 2031 from another critical angle
  • For this track, if the goal is to expose those new to the field to the fields' essentials, I'd cover more material during the instruction phases and leave less for discussions.
  • The slides could have used more visuals maybe? I think today was very good
  • the debate was a bit of a miss for me, as no one was cyber-expert so we had no real basis to have an informed discussion / debate. i would have rather spent more time listening to speaker or simply
  • The discussions are good, but could be a bit heuristic and a more concrete code-based tutorial would be nice to better understand alignment in practice
  • A bit of overview of the papers/readings before unstructured reading time to make sure we hit on key concepts
  • nothing
  • SGTM is awesome! Some more time on it -- the mathematics -- could be helpful.
  • Nothing
  • This was a great day: I genuinely don't think there was much to improve. Perhaps during the example of redteaming/blueteaming to not give specific examples and instead let us figure it out on our own.
  • Maybe spend more time on SGTM and gradient routing.
  • Lectures were very professional. I would have liked more time for the game at the end, but I don't know if this is even feasible. My low energy on the day had nothing to do with the lectures themselves.
  • I think the slides could have been more detailed. The reading was a lot more informative than the presentations.
Changed my mind10
  • I did not realise that most of the effort of technical alignment does not go to pre-training.
  • The day has spiked my interest in the red-teaming approach to safety.
  • I didn't
  • I'm much more aware of how even policy and governance decisions can have a technical and research aspect to them like tradeoffs of pacing AI development and deployment
  • Jailbreaking turned out to be even easier than I expected.
  • The safety of open weight models
  • Safety for open weight models seems almost impossible
  • Alignment in practice seems like a Sisyphean enterprise, and I think that it would be worthwhile knowing the tradeoff landscape more quantitatively.
  • The fact that some of these techniques work, tells me a lot about the structure of LLMs that I didnt know before. It really helped to get more perspective/clues on how to think about the model internals.
  • I learned about personas and AI as a way for aligning
Other thoughts1
  • Generally, given the mathematical expertise of the audience, erring on presenting mathematically complete material (when appropriate/available), would be welcome and, I think, efficient.

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