This is an independent review, and all views represented are my own. An early version of this draft was approved by Lens Academy, but this post was not commissioned by them.
Executive Summary
I took Lens Academy's Compute Verification intensive during the week of September 7 2026. I had a positive experience and registered to retake it during week of October 26. If you are interested in Compute Verification, please apply by 11:59 PM October 19 AoE.
Review
Motivation
There exist many open problems in ensuring the verifiability of frontier pacing commitments which are not currently tractable under a purely automated approach, where progress requires both large scale global coordination and technological innovation. Talent pipelines are required to get students and early-career professionals up to speed, but rarely (if ever) have evaluators with nonzero research experience.
Quick Takes
I enjoyed the small study group discussions and believe the cohort format works well. The course was split into 5 units, and we did one of them every day. I'd like to do a more in-depth review at some point, but it would likely be after my second take.
Student feedback was elicited ~2x daily and usually acted upon within ~minutes.
I consider Lens' content to be less mature than comparable frontier LLM safety research upskilling programs such as ARENA, but Lens' update rate is faster. [1]
The course exposed me to fresh material I wouldn't have come across normally since it isn't in the places where I normally do my reading (e.g arxiv/wikipedia), such as:
Practice Guide to International Treaties.
Reading Statutes and Bills.
Implementation of NPT Safeguards Agreement and relevant provisions of the United Nations Security Council resolutions in the Islamic Republic of Iran.
ORDER RELATING TO SEAGATE TECHNOLOGY LLC AND SEAGATE SINGAPORE INTERNATIONAL HEADQUARTERS PTE. LTD.
Report of the International Law Commission.
Goals
What were the goals of the people who self-selected into taking this free course?
Participants from Hawking and Socrates group[2] recorded goals in Unit 1, analysis below.
This wasn't a focus in the intensive, but Lens will be running a Part 2 which will go further into technical components.
Portishead
Make tool or product to help policymakers.
Learned about geographical supply-chain bottlenecks.
Underspecified.
DJ Shadow
Finish intensive.
Connect finance or cybersecurity work to material.
Done
Limited evidence of progress.
DJ Shadow may have done all the readings and DJ Shadow may be able to correctly answer questions about them, but completing the week isn't strong evidence of that.
The example DJ Shadow cites as being applicable to DJ Shadow's work does not seem to appear in the material. [5]
Tricky
Help with PauseAI US Advocacy.
Contribute to a technical verification project.
Developed questions about practical feasibility and governance.
I don't remember who first said this, but I like the quote "There's a very high degree of heterogeneity in results that makes simple statements such as X is better than Y generally wrong except in cases where there's a very large difference in capability between models."
Students cloistered into cohorts based on meeting availability. Hawking group met daily from 14:30 to 16:00. Sometimes we were visited by students from Socrates, which met earlier in the day.
These band names spilled out of my Kaito KA350 Emergency Radio, set to Canada's longest running radio documentary, "Ongoing History of New Music", E1086, "The story of trip-hop".
...alright, not all band names are trip-hop. Okay so these guys just performed at Scotiabank Arena and I had made plans to go see them (under the Golden Full Harvest Moon! during the Mid-Autumn festival! PayPal on SeatGeek right before motherfucking Petrov day!!!) but in fact reality oh so rarely works out the way you perfectly arranged for it to go; as brother Sanā'ī would spew spli tha mf Moon in two Sun, bruh my truth-seeking balls finna enter tenseigan chakra mode fr.
Which hackathon? If it's an Apart Sprint, then the last one was on AI Incident Response, the next one's Collusion, but most relevant for verification is "Ho TAIG hast thou heard the decree?"
This is an independent review, and all views represented are my own. An early version of this draft was approved by Lens Academy, but this post was not commissioned by them.
Executive Summary
I took Lens Academy's Compute Verification intensive during the week of September 7 2026. I had a positive experience and registered to retake it during week of October 26. If you are interested in Compute Verification, please apply by 11:59 PM October 19 AoE.
Review
Motivation
There exist many open problems in ensuring the verifiability of frontier pacing commitments which are not currently tractable under a purely automated approach, where progress requires both large scale global coordination and technological innovation. Talent pipelines are required to get students and early-career professionals up to speed, but rarely (if ever) have evaluators with nonzero research experience.
Quick Takes
Goals
What were the goals of the people who self-selected into taking this free course?
Participants from Hawking and Socrates group[2] recorded goals in Unit 1, analysis below.
All names anonymized.[3]
Student
Plans
Progress
Problems
Nine Inch Иails
Weezer[4]
Portishead
DJ Shadow
Tricky
Afrika Bambaataa
Massive Attack
Björk
No original goal documented.
Got a good baseline, alongside a better understanding of hardware verification's weaknesses.
Related Work
See Marta Kosmyna's review.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Mark Kagach for helpful feedback and comments.
Session documents written by members of Hawking and Socrates group.
This work almost used compute resources provided by Side Channel Cloud (https://sidechannel.cloud), operated by Amodo Design.
I don't remember who first said this, but I like the quote "There's a very high degree of heterogeneity in results that makes simple statements such as X is better than Y generally wrong except in cases where there's a very large difference in capability between models."
Students cloistered into cohorts based on meeting availability. Hawking group met daily from 14:30 to 16:00. Sometimes we were visited by students from Socrates, which met earlier in the day.
These band names spilled out of my Kaito KA350 Emergency Radio, set to Canada's longest running radio documentary, "Ongoing History of New Music", E1086, "The story of trip-hop".
...alright, not all band names are trip-hop. Okay so these guys just performed at Scotiabank Arena and I had made plans to go see them (under the Golden Full Harvest Moon! during the Mid-Autumn festival! PayPal on SeatGeek right before motherfucking Petrov day!!!) but in fact reality oh so rarely works out the way you perfectly arranged for it to go; as brother Sanā'ī would spew spli tha mf Moon in two Sun, bruh my truth-seeking balls finna enter tenseigan chakra mode fr.
electric boogaloo
Which hackathon? If it's an Apart Sprint, then the last one was on AI Incident Response, the next one's Collusion, but most relevant for verification is "Ho TAIG hast thou heard the decree?"
remember kids, always account for Peripheral Component Interconnect Express Data Transfer Encoding Throughput Overhead, which varies by generation:
a one-two 🎵 each byte of data is converted into a 10-bit data code 🎵 (20 to 25 percent!)
a three-four 🎵 ampere's a hundred bee and twenty-eight over a hundred bee plus thirty,
so basically that's an anti ochus vii over a phraates tee 🎵 (1.5 percent!)
a five-six 🎵 old hopper's the same encoding
at twice as many
transfers-per-second 🎵 (64 GT!)
a six-seven 🎵 for blackwell i won't get into fixed size F.L.I.T 🎵 (94.5 efficiency!)
a seven-eight 🎵 and that's all cause vera rubin
does away with
traditional bus interfaces
entirely* 🎵 (NVLink bitches!)
*termsandconditionsapply verarubindoesnotuse PCIeforCPUGPUorGPUGPU communication PCIeGen6remainsforIO toNICandDPUandStorage talktoyourfounderaboutC2traffictoday.