Almost two months ago, Iliad announced the Iliad Intensive and Iliad Fellowship. Fellowships are a well-understood unit, but what is an intensive? This post explains this in more detail! For more details on the content, see the Iliad Intensive Course Materials post.

Comparison. The Iliad Intensive has similarities to ARENA, but focuses more on foundational AI alignment research instead of alignment research engineering. Expect more math and less coding.

Rhythm. It’s currently four weeks long. Five days a week. 10am till 6pm every day, with lunch and an afternoon break. This makes for around 6.5 hours of learning a day, which is at the upper end of how long most people can concentrate deeply within a day. This is why we call it “Intensive”.

Content. The Iliad Intensive is broken into five clusters, with 20 total modules, one for each day. The clusters and modules in the April iteration are below. We expect to add substantially more topics and material over the coming months. There is much more material than can be covered in a single month, so different Intensives will vary in content.

Alignment Cluster
- AI Alignment: an Introduction
- Alignment in Practice
- AI Alignment: The Field
Learning Cluster
- Deep Learning 1
- Deep Learning 2
- Singular Learning Theory
- Training Dynamics
- Data Attribution
Interpretability Cluster
- Intro to ML Engineering
- Mechanistic Interpretability
- In-Context Learning and Belief State Geometry
- Abstractions and Latents
Agency Cluster
- Reinforcement Learning
- Idealized Agency: Coherency and AIXI
- Agent Foundations
- Reward Learning theory
- World Models
Safety Guarantees and their Limits
- Debate
- Steganography and Backdoors
- Worst-case Interpretability and Heuristic Arguments

We will share the entire curriculum of the April iteration at the start of May, alongside a reflection of how the program went. In the meantime, here you can find a problem sheet that formed the theoretical component for the day on reinforcement learning. The students had the choice between working through this or working through ARENA’s RL intro day.

A typical day. We do not yet have a set daily structure. We may narrow down more in the future based on student feedback, but currently, we are experimenting with the following types of sessions:

Internal lectures and expert guest lectures;
Reading sessions: Students read a paper or blogpost;
Whole-class discussions and small-group discussions, with and without discussi

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Umar Kashif

Umar Kashif