2026 AI/ML Research Fellow

Job description

10 places are open for the 2026 term, with a duration of 6 or 12 months at the applicant's option. The intent of the fellowship is to focus on high risk research: ambitious projects that may not produce results, but will have lasting impact if they work. We believe that publication in AI/ML has become overly biased towards short-term and iterative results, despite major gaps in our understanding of how to build optimal models. Our focus is on frontier research: order-of-magnitude improvements, rather than disposable papers barely better than baseline. The goal of these fellowships is to give awardees uninterrupted time to focus on harder open problems, with adequate compute, talented peers, and weekly 1:1 mentorship from senior researchers but without chasing specific metrics. You will be expected to spend about 80% of your time on your own research, and up to 20% of your time either assisting other fellows or participating in wider research programs at IMI. We focus largely on applied research and its applications to online security problems, but often publish and support frontier research aligned with our broader interests. Serving hundreds of millions of people gives us a unique...