Ryan Kidd

So I would say...

I really do encourage everyone to do a basic blue dot course or equivalent, like AI Safety Atlas and CASE have good courses as well.

But I think that this is not as required for selection, and it's more just to prevent you from entering maths and then starting to do a research project and realizing, oh crap, I have no idea where the gaps are.

I don't understand how my work fits into anything.

How do I get funding after maths?

How do I get a job?

Blah, blah, blah.

How do I choose a good original research direction?

So it's more for your ability to actually deliver within the program, tracking research, and less to do with your ability to get in at the moment, which is pretty important because maths is just a stepping stone.

If you do maths and then you don't produce a great deliverable by the end of maths, sure, it's a great thing on your resume, but it's not going to be...

enough in many cases you know because it's such a competitive environment so yeah i think that it's really good for people to build a shallow but broad understanding of the literature so i would recommend like don't be checking x constantly for new papers blah blah unless they're in your field maybe set up some google scholar alerts for interp if that's your thing but like more every so often do a periodic like deep dive into like what are all the cool updates across different fields you know what i mean and you can do this by like every year looking at the new blue dog course

or every month looking at some research roundups or highlights, like Zvi as a newsletter or Transformer, and there are other people you can follow on X. That's my main recommendation.

Yeah, so last program, I think we accepted around 5% of people, maybe 4% who applied in our initial intake form.

There was a subsequent process that they had to complete, which is applying to specific mentors and streams.

And I think we accepted somewhere around 6.5% to 7% of those people, so a bit higher.

That maybe is the figure I'd focus on, somewhere around 7%, let's say.

Now that's better than people think, right?

They hear, they thought it was something like a, I think the Anthropic Fellows Program, for example, is like 2% because Anthropic, big name, right?

The mass is larger.

We have more diversity and more spots and so on.