Tobias H

Advanced AI could go badly wrong for humanity. Pivotal exists to lower that risk. We try to find the strongest new researchers and put them to work on it with experienced mentors in our fellowship. TL;DR: > 15 weeks of funded, full-time AI safety research in London (January 18 -...

[LLM use: Workshopped over weeks by multiple team members with LLM use across research, drafting, and editing. Unclear whether the final text exceeds the Forum's 10% threshold.] This is the companion post to our Frontier Biodefense Fellowship announcement. The short post covers the practical details. This one explains why we...

August 3 to October 2, 2026 in London | Applications close June 7 (AoE) TL;DR: We're running our first Frontier Biodefense Fellowship at pivotal. Nine weeks, fully funded, 1:1 mentorship from Blueprint, SecureBio, SynX, Coefficient Giving, CLTR and more. Open to applicants from a wide range of backgrounds, including those...

AI may be the most consequential technology humanity builds, and whether it goes well depends in large part on how many talented people are working seriously on making it go well. The Pivotal Research Fellowship (a 9-week in-person research program in London) is our attempt to grow that group. Our...

Many AI safety programs have acceptance rates in the 1–5% range. That can make it hard to tell when applying is actually worth your time. In this post, we: * Sketch a simple expected value (EV) model for “should I apply?” * Illustrate the model using our upcoming pivotal research...

TL;DR: 9-week, full-time AI safety research fellowship in London. Work closely with mentors from leading orgs such as Google DeepMind, Redwood Research, SecureBio, etc. Receive a £6-8k stipend, £2k accommodation + travel support, £2.5k+ compute, co-working (with meals) at LISA. ~70% of recent fellows continued on fully-funded extensions (up to...

The Standard Reading If you've heard of Le Guin's ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’, you probably know the basic idea. It's a go-to story for discussions of utilitarianism and its downsides. A paper calls it “the infamous objection brought up by Ursula Le Guin”. It shows up in...