Intro Fellowships

The Intro to AI Safety Fellowship is a 6-8 week, quarter-long course which explores the impact of increasingly powerful AI systems on society, explains the problems which the AI safety field is currently working on, and goes over active areas of research.

The program consists of a series of video and reading lessons which are accompanied by weekly, collective meetings that expand on the topics covered in the lessons. You can expect to learn from many prevailing sources in the field which will help you develop a solid research agenda that you may work towards in the following quarters.

In the 6-week technical fellowships, participants will complete about 3 hours of core content outside of hour-long weekly meetings, split between conceptual readings and technical content. In the 8-week governance fellowship, there is no mandatory time commitment outside of the two-hour weekly meetings, each of which will be equally split between readings and discussion. We encourage participants to do some or all of the optional readings before each meeting to dive deeper on topics that interest them!

Curriculum Options

Since Fall 2023, we have started offering multiple tracks for our intro fellowships. Click on the links below to explore each tracks’ associated curricula:

• Computer Vision
• Diffusion
• Reinforcement Learning
• Transformers
• Governance

Eligibility

For our transformers fellowship, we’re looking for students who meet any of the following requirements:

• Have taken CS 31 or an equivalent class OR
• Have worked on a Python project OR
• Have strong skills in another programming language
• Additionally, a basic understanding of machine learning fundamentals and familiarity with contemporary AI research would provide a good baseline for the course’s content.

For our governance fellowship, we do not enforce any particular requirements. However, we are very excited to see participants who:

• Have strong writing and communication ability
• Are familiar with US policy (e.g., have engaged in policy research or an internship)
• Have some familiarity with computer science or another technical field.
• Once again, these are not enforced! We encourage all participants to apply, because interest and motivation are the two traits we care most about.

Apply

Applications are not open yet for Spring 2025.