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.

Questions about pay, travel, logistics or materials: see the FAQ.

Your days

[A.2]Alignment in Practice Fri 6 Nov, leading 52 responses · energy 4.1/5

Overall +0.63 better than expected n = 49

Content +0.55 better than expected n = 49

Clarity +0.43 better than expected n = 49

Motivation +0.84 better than expected n = 49

Exercises +0.62 better than expected n = 26

Readings +0.64 better than expected n = 47

Other activities +0.51 better than expected n = 45

Pace -0.12 about right n = 49

Difficulty -0.16 about right n = 49

Novelty +0.22 an even mix n = 49

Read what they wrote76

Worked well16

The game
The first lecture was very well-done and I think it's really important.
The lectures in the morning were amazing, really interesting and also well-structured. The challenging activity in the afternoon was so educational, and there was a good amount of time for pre-reading. The fact that the challenge was going to follow also helped increase my focus on the pre-reading, because everything learned was about to be used.
The final game was very insightful and I enjoyed the discussion a lot.
I really enjoyed the red/blue teaming exercise. The "adversarial" setup provided a motivating pressure to think broadly and deeply about how to solve real problems in the present, and I liked this hands-on feeling.
I really enjoyed the red team/blue team exercise. It was a very meaningful way of engaging with alignment and I hope we do more in this style!
The best part of this class was the debate organised at the end. I really liked the format, where we spent 2 hours learning about the topic and then formed teams to create safety challenges and break them. Thinking in this way really cleared things up for me for a lot.
I really enjoyed the exercise! I got more out of the reading because I knew what to focus on and retain for the exercise.
The reading exercise
The blue/red-teaming activity. The whole combination of the day today.
Good lecturing style and structure
It's nice to hear different topics each day. After having some days with fairly philosophical discussions it was nice to have a day with complete focus on practical aspects.
The exercise in the afternoon had a lot of very interesting discussion:)
Very engaging speaker
The solid mathematical background of GR and SGTM provided good sanity checks
Today we covered a material that likely everyone in the AI safety field has to know well, which is the alignment pipeline. Despite that, this material was among those that I regard as my weakness, as it is not using much scientific intuition that I possess and is more about the current state of the alignment approaches. Given that, today's session perhaps was the most helpful one for me in order to feel more prepared for the AI safety field.

Would improve49

-
great lecture.
not much, it was overall good
I didn't love the exercise. For me, it was more like a debate thing rather than designing a system. The only thing we did with my team was put every single thing we read about on a system. Like, its not like we know a lot of variants of ways of training and post-training. I understand that anyway the goal was to discuss and become aware of these subtleties, but it was weird nonetheless.
The group exercise was very interesting, but I would do it in smaller group to have more chance for everybody to participate to the discussion
I think I would prefer more information about the real world and what actual companies/governments/other organizations do that playing a game.
The day was great. I would maybe improve the repartitions into pretraining/post-training/deployment in the afternoon activity
It was great
Good
Everything was alright!
overall very good, Margot spoke clearly and engagingly and had a fun exercise at the end that got everyone interacting well with each other
Amazing. Extremely valuable day. Only possible improvement would have been some advance room-bookings, more break-out spaces in the afternoon when we were doing the team activities.
Maybe try to stop discussion when it becomes too long, to have enough time to visit every remaining concept in the lecture.
I wasn't here in the morning, but the red/blue/judge exercise was great! Maybe even more time for more iterations, maybe a slight increase in competition pressure, also I'm not sure if the intended procedures and scope for red/blue teaming were clear to everyone. But it went well overall.
Nothing, good studying material and good game.
Today was the best day so far! I think we should have given space for people to read on more than one topic, specially for the exercise. the readings were not that long, and it would have been more interesting if people were familiar with all the areas (pre-training, post-training and deployment).
Would have appreciated more technical material, slides were too descriptive, and figures are of low quality/very pixelated, hardly readable. Also seems like we rushed through and skipped many slides, felt very rushed. Again, some participants are asking too many questions to frequently.
First part of this day was great, I think the teacher was excellent and very knowledgeable. Evals/audits are probably my favourite topic. All I'd say is that she spoke and went through the slides far too quickly. I think it would've benefitted from a bit less detail done a bit slower. E.g. more should have been allocated to private reading. The structure of day 2 was great in this respect, I think more days should be like that I think the group exercise drifted a lot. I felt like both groups lost sight of "safety" and the fact that the fine tuning API was the pressure point (it should make people think of emergent misalignment). I think more intervention from the TAs would be great.
this seemed okay
It will be helpful to have name tags
**posting again as I would like to correct my previous, somewhat unfair assessment in my last point 4** 1. This would be a great lecture for opening the week. It was quite general and didn't go deeper in any topic (not necessarily bad). 2. The group exercise was fun and creative, however too generic. The teams would benefit if the rubric was a more specific, realistic scenario where we would focus on pretraining only or agents escaping the lab only (for example). Asking from a team to come up with a solution for *all* problems in training, deployment and alignment in 30 minutes is defocusing. Less is more. 3. I would give clearer practical instructions for the group exercise (what each color means, what each number means, in which room to convene etc) and post them on the board (not discord). 4. I wouldn't spend so much time to entertain all questions from the audience but rather focus on delivering the content. At several points the conversation felt repetive and it was missing the point. As a result, some great ideas - both on the slides and the reading material - were not touched upon at all in the classroom due to lack of time.
I think the blue team vs. red team game was particularly helpful to think about pros and cons of several methods to make models safe. However, I wish I had a better grasp of some of the techniques in order to make my case in a more cogent way. Perhaps, it would help to have more reading time or cover a bunch of these techniques in the lecture in more detail. Also, I think it would help to wrap everything up at the end of the game with a short discussion open to everybody on the main weak points of these techniques and how they could be improved.
It is good today
It was actually a very good class, and there was very little to improve.
I would put this lecture first in the week. It was pretty generic and would fit well as opening. It didn't examine any topic in depth and the group exercise, although fun, it was also too generic to be helpful. This would be more efficient and focused if we were presented with a narrower case, e.g. "there is a legitimate researcher that does such and such and wants to achieve X while a malicious hacker wants to use the model for Y. How do you block one while allowing the other?". Some detailed scenario that will lead the teams into thinking about *a few* particular problems and techniques and not *all* the problems of training, deployment and alignment at once, making the debate unbounded. Side comment for the lecturer: I would leave 'watercooler' conversations for after the class and prioritise delivering content. I felt a great part of the lecture was spent in informal and unhelpful chats.
Overall good. Feel I learnt a lot here.
The day was excellent overall. I think that one thing that would have improved the final stage even more, would have been to have been given a 'model answer' for blue and red team, after we all tried out the debates ourselves. This would have been useful because many of our arguments were of course uninformed or not the most coherent, whereas seeing a well thought out red/blue team discussion ideas from the lecturers/ judges would have made our final understanding more concrete and precise of what is feasible and correct, and what is not.
Nothing, Margot to a fantastic job! She was really organised, knowedgable and designed the exercise well.
Maybe designated space to work in group
It's hard to say what to improve, as the course was very interesting and well-structured. The exercise, whilst engaging, was very unclear to my team (group 2, red team). It felt like we had no clear scope and (at least) I misunderstood a lot of the intermediate tasks, but more because the general purpose was very vague. Perhaps it felt quite rushed as well. All in all, I'm sure this can be a very exciting activity, with minor improvements and clarifications. This being the end of the first week might also have affected it given our low energy levels (not saying energy drinks could compensate).
More discussion
NIL, thoroughly enjoyed it!
maybe the exercise is too long ? not sure though it's interesting
The topic and structure of the blue team/red team was quite vague, but maybe that was on purpose
Great!
The lecture could give a little more details about different alignment techniques (though I understand that we skipped them because the participants asked too many questions).
Probably nothing, today was briliant, especially the redteaming.
Good day over all. Very good lecturer. The TA could've been a bit more organised/focused and stricter with the rules of the exercise.
Today's talk is a bit vague
Maybe enter more into details the mainstream approaches of Alignment techniques and give a taxonomy.
I thought the topic today was super interesting. Maybe I would like to have more time to discuss the topic with the teacher. But anyway, the exercise afterward was also super interesting.
The organization of the afternoon exercise was a bit confusing. I preferred the format the other day where groups were announced on discord, except for the letter to number correspondence part
It would have some more technical details on the tree stages, even though I understand time is limited. In a similar spirit I felt the talk for the debate was very broad, so while it was fun and interesting, I could have gotten more from a somewhat narrower task.
Not much; I really enjoyed the day. I do think that the length of activities was a wee bit long but overall great day!
Nothing
I feel like we skimmed through a lot material and many things were difficult to follow. There was a lot of open-ended discussion but I didn't get much from the slides.
Today was great
Make it clear in the last exercise that while pitching the AI model one should stress on quantifiable proeprties, rather than philosphical debate (I agree this is much needed but it cannot be the base line).
Likely, I would be slower in describing the alignment pipeline. For example, describing in more detail the evolution of the pipeline from the historical perspective would give us a stronger perception of the new types of risks emerged over time with more powerful models and what were the newly introduced measures/criteria/open problems that appeared along the way. All those was touched in the session but more structure in covering it and a bit slower pace would make it more effective.

Changed my mind9

I actually got a favorable impression of the J-lens (yesterday some people were convincing me it's not useful).
I tried out some ideas that didn't wind up working.
Be in the shoes (virtually) of a person taking decision at a company makes me realize how hard the decisions are and that there are a lot of trade-offs there.
It started to feel more reasonable/concrete that (and how) AI companies can create models and give the public access without necessarily causing unbounded catastrophic consequences.
N/A
I think the sessions are getting derailed by open ended discussion during the lectures. I think this is good in general, but it is harder to follow the thread occasionally because of a fair bit of back and forth, some of which should really happen on a 1-to-1
Personas get baked in during pretraining. Deeper understanding of the methods to avoid harmful behaviours from beginning. Way better understanding of the whole training process. Mostly confirmed my views that getting safe AI will be very hard, next to impossible.
I think my understanding/appreciation of just how important a role the model deployer has is to mitigating misuse other than adding harnesses/flagging output. There are plenty of ways to implement safeguards to ensure bad actors do not get access however I understand that a.) this is hard and b.) this is still very much an open problem.
I would say that I didn't change my mind in a big way, but prepared it more for the AI safety field :)

Other thoughts2

the reading chunk was rather long, that could have been shorter, or have more in-person activities
N/a

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

Elsewhere