This is a link post.

Through the MATS program, we (Alex Turner and Alex Cloud[1]) help alignment researchers grow from seeds into majestic trees. We have fun, consistently make real alignment progress, and help scholars tap into their latent abilities.

MATS summer '26 applications are open until January 18th!

Team Shard in MATS 6.0 during the summer of '24. From left: Evžen Wyitbul, Jacob Goldman-Wetzler, Alex Turner, Alex Cloud, and Joseph Miller.

Many mentees now fill impactful roles.

Lisa Thiergart (MATS 3.0) moved on to being a research lead at MIRI and is now a senior director at the SL5 task force.
Alex Cloud (MATS 6.0) went from mentee to co-mentor in one round and also secured a job at Anthropic. Lead author on the Subliminal Learning paper.
Jacob Goldman-Wetzler (MATS 6.0) also accepted an offer from Anthropic!
Luke Marks accepted work with Redwood Research after MATS 8.0.
And several mentees have gone on to the Anthropic Fellows program.

We likewise have a strong track record in research outputs, including

Pioneering steering vectors for use in LLMs (Steering GPT-2-XL by Adding an Activation Vector, Steering LLAMA-2 With Contrastive Activation Additions),
Masking Gradients to Localize Computation in Neural Networks,
Distillation [...]

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Outline:

(03:01) Testimonials

(03:05) Lisa Thiergart

(03:47) Jacob Goldman-Wetzler

(04:14) Bruce Lee

(04:44) Ariana Azarbal

(05:32) Apply today

The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.

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First published:
December 26th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hgoj2WAwLwn3qWLuc/team-shard-alignment-mentorship-from-turntrout-and-alex

[Linkpost] “Team Shard: Alignment Mentorship from TurnTrout and Alex Cloud” by TurnTrout, cloud

LessWrong (30+ Karma)