Intensive Teaching · November 2026

The most important things

Before: Join the Iliad Discord and check you can see #intensive-november. 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 17:40, 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.

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Your days

[A.1]AI Alignment Introduction Tue 3 Nov, leading 66 responses · energy 4.0/5

Overall +0.50 better than expected n = 64

Content +0.44 better than expected n = 64

Clarity +0.64 better than expected n = 64

Motivation +0.69 better than expected n = 64

Exercises +0.22 as expected n = 27

Readings +0.41 better than expected n = 64

Other activities +0.19 as expected n = 57

Pace -0.14 about right n = 64

Difficulty -0.44 too easy n = 64

Novelty -0.11 an even mix n = 64

Read what they wrote81

Worked well22

I think George was a great lecturer! I really enjoyed all of the topics discussed
Discussions are wonderful.
I thought George did a great job today, breaking up the time into organised windows, mixing a bit of lecturing, self-reading, and group discussion. That was well-thought-out and organised and works given the space constraints and large number of participants. George spoke clearly and engaged with all questions earnestly. Also having planned x minute breaks was AMAZING! that should be part of the standard day, there should be an actual coffee break as part of the schedule template for all days; or some down time to catch up on emails or other stuff
I liked discussions in small groups and then opening it up to everyone at the end of each session.
George was a great teacher: clear, engaging presentation, and informative answers to questions. I think it's quite an achievement to get a room full of mathematicians so invested in content that contained essentially no maths.
The motivation for allignment was very well explained, so it motivates a lot the lecture and why it matters.
Great teacher!
I think discussion groups are good overall, especially for cases when materials are relatively introductory. We can go more into specialised topics of interest in the discussions.
A lot of emphasis on active learning.
the sessions format
The small and big-group discussions.
I do like breaking up the hour into lectures/discussions
The structure of the course was a good idea. The Intro->reading->discussion part.
I really liked the format with regular breaks and discussions, made it easier to stay engaged!
Just the instructor's ability to make us engage with the material.
The switching between intro, reading and discussion was very helpful imo.
Discussion with other peers was very interesting.
Alternating between lecture, reading and discussion, in a 1 hour span of time, was particularly effective to quickly digest new topics.
Very energising and helpful lecturer
The session pattern was great. Specifically, skim reading papers and blog posts, then discussing clearly abides by the quote "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts". Then, the frequent breaks helped in digesting the information and refreshing for the next part.
I think the discussion periods (the small “breakout” discussions before we went to wider discussion) were particularly nice, as it got us to hear other interpretations more deeply and to hear about other texts people had chosen
The structure of the sessions: intro talk, reading, discussion in groups, question+answer time, break.

Would improve42

N/A
It would be cool to have a bit more technical and/or hands-on content, maybe some more discussion of partial progress on alignment
Cannot come up with anything specific.
empirical practice of alignment in the companies
(a) a lot of the readings also have a youtube video, some with animations (e.g. huggingface) ... consider, to mix up learning styles, replacing some of the readings with the group watching some of a video explainer? because otherwise it's quite reading heavy ... and like, how much of the 91 page METR report are folks realistically gonna get through in 30 minutes ...
Thought it was amazing, although it is a shame that some discussions were missed. Maybe it would be worth having 5 sessions instead of 6 to ensure we don't miss any of these discussions that I found helpful.
Sometimes the speaker forgot to repeat the question, but I think they became better during the day
Maybe less sessions, the topics were a little repetitive imo. The suggested prompts for discussion was not very interesting imo, I'd rather more philosophical questions.
Today was great!
Increase time in discussion groups.
Some of the readings were too long to finish within the allotted time. This was not a major issue, as not all of the material was essential for the subsequent discussions. However, it would have been helpful to indicate beforehand which sections of the longer readings were more important to focus on.
All seem good to me.
The speaker was rambling a bit some times. I have hard time reading in the room with other people talking. But in general this way of teaching works pretty well.
It feels that the discussions are a bit too detached from the lecture. We mainly have a pattern of lecturer goes over content with some Q and A (these are the best parts), and we do some reading, and then we discuss in small groups. I think it would be much better if we actually went through a paper together (all of us) with the lecturer guiding it or what they find interesting about it with Q and As and discussion built into that instead of separating it. Currently it feels like you could just pre record the lecturer videos (besides the questions asked), read the paper by yourself and talk with the other attendees instead.
The format was good.
Ran out of chicken at lunch
Maybe it would be better to have little lectures where the material is condensed instead of trying to read the original source and running out of time/not getting very far. 6 times the read/discuss block was also a bit much
I found the amount of material and the breadth a bit overwhelming. I don't know how to distil all this down to obtain more narrow, well-defined problems, or how to connect it to the underlying mathematics of AI - though maybe that should be a future goal. I also couldn't see the logical structure of the topics and I think the volume of suggested reading, where I could only ever read a bit of it, added to the overwhelm. Not that there weren't lots of interesting things contained though, really interesting.
I particularly enjoyed today, but I think at least for me I didn't have enough reading time to absorb the readings appropiately!
I would want a more detailed elaboration on each of the materials taught. I would also have wanted a brief explanation of SOTA for tackling each of these problems in alignment.
Too much reading
We did not have time to actually do the suggested readings. It's a bit silly to have us read for 20 minutes when the readings take longer than that. I would have preferred to have the readings beforehand. Also, I want more technical information/discussion. I can get this information (and indeed already knew about it) from popular and well-known resources for laypeople.
This was a good high-speed coverage of the main points of the alignment problem. People around me often said they hadn't finished readings.
There were some issues with lunch. When the second group went for lunch, there wasn't enough food left.
Nothing comes to mind, today wasgreat!
While the material was very well curated, I found it a bit distracting that we had to choose 1 out of X papers to read per topic, whereas most group discussions only focused on one of the papers, so if you chose the wrong paper to read you couldn't actively participate in the discussion. I was also hoping for more technical material, it was too philosophical for me.
maybe reduce the number of sessions that felt too exhausting, and make an effort in formalizing topics. I know alignment is not a well defined science, but still, reading a lot of the posts we were required to read I got the feeling it was too many opinions and less of "this could be a definition, or this paper attempts to formalize something". No hard feelings, I still enjoyed it overall.
It could be more clear what the mathematical aspects are of alignment. Another thing is that, for me, the time to study the texts was rather short.
The readings felt a bit like the blind guiding the blind. I don't really know if it's supposed to be that way because the field is new or because more guidance would have been nice for this part. We were asked to write question on the board, but I didn't really understand what made a good research question to follow up on with these readings? Maybe being more explicit about the learning goal of the reading could have given some guidance for the discussions, but perhaps exploring these ideas as a group was the goal?
Today was awesome. The instructor motivated the material beautifully and guided the interactions very well.
Make it a bit more concrete
I liked it overall, very interesting topic. It was also good to point out the problem of the lack of formal definitions, especially when talking about the higher-level concepts. One should point out even more that this is typical for a developing field. I have the feeling some expectations are "here is the formalism we have built and here is open questions".
N/A
overall really great, not a lot of critisism. At one point questions were being writtten on the board then we came to them last though which meant that it diditn make sense to write them there as we discussed things direct in person first
Not much personal engagement from teacher, unsure how much to expect since there's only been 2 days. Readings were sometimes too long (40-50 page paper iirc) or a bit too short. I ended up reading the thing that was more realistic to digest in the time given. I would have also preferred if there were fewer options, I think 2 would've made it more balanced.
The introduction to AI Alignment was a bit too general, and many of the concepts were not discussed. For instance, one reading was about goal-oriented AI models without properly defining what goal-oriented meant. I was expecting to devote more time to discussing specific concepts to improve my technical expertise, but it was more like a general discussion about alignment and incidents. I guess I was expecting something more high-level or precise. Also, there was quite a lot of reading today.
The lecture was very good, I do not have particular suggestions at the moment.
Clearer desired output after each reading session. Eg: write one summary with 3 bullet points, one open question, one prediction of yours (was asked for on the slides but not discussed).
Can't think of much to improve; the session was very interesting, the readings varied, and the interactive discussions really enabled a lot of nice ideas / worrisome concerns. One thing I was thinking would be interesting to check would be also ask which parts of the reading material people went for (maybe as a poll); some interesting data could come out of people's preferences.
It is possible to add some technical chapters appropriately, rather than most of the content being comprehension and conceptual.
It was great to have discussions and the fact that we needed to actually read articles helped a lot.
The sessions were great today; a good range of excerpts to choose from for each session. In particular, I think we could’ve had more time to read in some of the sections as some consisted of quite large texts. I also think, before the reading, some key goals should be concretely laid out to be looking for in the reading (this could simply be showing us the discussion prompts while we are reading so we can have an idea about what to form an opinion on.

Changed my mind13

N/A
Discussions in smaller groups were good to invite pushback on my priors and assumptions
Now I am thinking about AI safety in a more formal and mathematical way.
I was curious to see that many people here are actually indeed quite new to many AI safety concepts but are very receptive of them.
Not so much, mostly just confirmed what I knew. But I liked the post on think training stories. I think we need something like that.
I had some interesting discussions over dinner about J-lenses and J-space topics.
I am convinced AI is a bigger risk than I thought before. Glad to be here!
If anything, I am rather surprised by how short on time we are as far as alignment is concerned with the rapid speed of progress. AI 2027 was eye-opening.
Yes, I am reconsidering my own definition of goal -directedness and started thinking about subgoals.
That recent empirical studies (toy models of the past ~4 years), even though deep and formal in their reasoning, are mostly built on 'shaky' ground over undefined or ill-defined concepts like alignment, goals and more.
The last two sections were quite harrowing. I don't have an existing background in Alignment specifically, and even though I am working in ML, I realized I was perhaps a bit too dismissive about the rate at which LLMs are progressing. Most strongly I felt the heavy silence in the room as we were reading AI 2027, even after George told us we can start discussing. It felt like bonding, even if it's based on worrying over the same thing. I must say, it also felt like the discussions really opened up afterwards.
I thought the theory about personas (PSM) was very interesting, and offered a new insight into ways of thinking about interpretability that I hadn’t thought about before. Whilst I am still learning, this felt like a very strong lead wrt research direction in the field.
It's very clear why this topic must be researched and what are the possible consequences if we do not solve align

Other thoughts4

I think it would be great to emphasise open problems or research agendas/questions more concretely when giving lectures. Many people here are in position to start doing frontier research relatively quickly and yet are new to AI safety, so giving them some initial food for thought in terms of what can be their research topics, even if very tentative and preliminary, could be useful.
I do think there are too many people in this intensive and the venue is not suited for this. I wonder if it would be better to do the lectures at a lecture hall on a university campus. It is annoying to feel so crowded all day. We didn't even have enough food to feed everyone for lunch, and the lack of space to eat lunch creates awkward social situations. As one of only 4 other women in the program, the amount of crowding, the inability to actually see the board, the fact that you have to somewhat "fight" for a place to even sit every day and a place to have lunch are unnecessary distractions. The actual people are friendly and welcoming but the situation causes anxiety.
Thank you for this opportunity and the organisation!
N/a

Heuristic Arguments and Verification Wed 11 Nov, leading day plan not posted yet

The day

10:00 Lecture starts

12:30 Lunch

13:30 Afternoon session

17:40 Feedback form

18:00 Day ends

When	Where
Mon 2 – Fri 6 Nov	An office near LISA, address to follow
From Mon 9 Nov	LISA, 25 Holywell Row, London EC2A 4XE

Resources

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