How to apply to AI safety fellowships (and beyond)
The article provides strategic advice for applying to AI safety fellowships, emphasizing the need to distinguish oneself from the average applicant. It argues that application processes are noisy and adversarial, requiring candidates to make their skills clearly legible to reviewers. The author stresses that merely possessing the necessary talents is insufficient; one must effectively communicate these abilities to avoid being mistaken for a mediocre candidate.
- ▪The author successfully applied to the MATS AI safety fellowship and shares advice based on that experience.
- ▪Application processes are described as noisy and adversarial, where candidates must avoid overfitting to the process while still communicating their value.
- ▪A key strategy is to ensure every sentence in the application maximally distances the candidate from the 'Average Joe' applicant pool.
- ▪The concept of 'legibility' is central, meaning candidates must convince reviewers of their skills rather than just possessing them.
- ▪The author notes that many hiring processes have significant flaws and lack effective feedback loops from applicants to recruiters.
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Lesswrong |
| Canonical URL | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PiP4JqQFKhoqHGG2n/how-to-apply-to-ai-safety-fellowships-and-beyond |
| Publication time | Sat, 03 Oct 2026 17:43:29 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-10-03T17:49:01.841Z |
| Last seen | 2026-10-03T17:49:01.841Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | Rj5Itp4NE3SV · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
About a year ago, I decided to go all-in on applying to AI safety fellowships, and around the end of 2025 I got into MATS. I think there's a small art to communicating your skills legibly. When I've spoken with others about how I answer application questions, they seem to appreciate my advice. I wrote a MATS 9 Retrospective which was well-received, so consider this to be similar advice, but for applying to jobs or fellowships.Applying to AI safety fellowships or doing job applications is an adversarial process: The goal of an application process is to measure how well the candidate would do in the position they're applying for, but this process is noisy.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Lesswrong.
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