2027 AI/ML Research Fellow

10 places are open for the 2027 term, with a duration of 6 or 12 months at the applicant's option.

Purpose

There is a crisis in academic AI/ML research. What is still worth working on? Paper submissions have doubled on the arXiv and at ML conferences, and yet many submitters cannot even answer questions about the details of "their" work. Many people across applied research and theory groups, whether math, physics, or computer science, have the distinct feeling that perhaps it is pointless to work on anything other than AI safety and continual learning. If we simply draw a line continuing the capabilities progress of the past two years forward, it seems possible that human contributions will be a marginal input in many areas of research within two or three years. At the same time, it is clear that fundamental questions in model architecture, sample efficiency, explainability, and creativity are still unanswered, and that making progress on these topics is very likely to benefit humanity over the next two years. Designing or training for explainability and determinism may be much easier than achieving post hoc understanding of circuits forced out of scaled data by gradient descent and optimized through blind RL.

Our focus instead is on frontier research: order-of-magnitude improvements, rather than disposable papers barely better than baseline.

The intent 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 perspective as to what works at scale.

Eligibility:

previous fellows and research staff have come from disparate backgrounds, including early career researchers previously at MSR, FAIR, Mila, MPI, etc. and self taught senior engineers transitioning into research. We do not discriminate on the basis of pedigree or age. If you have done interesting work, that is enough. Conversely, if you don't already have publications that show you can do good self-directed research then this is not the right opportunity. Do not apply if you have no public evidence that you can do good self-directed research and produce results.

Location:

you may reside anywhere in the world, excluding sanctioned jurisdictions. This will be a remote fellowship. We do not sponsor visas.

Deliverables:

we do not have hard targets, and focus on quality. Fellows generally get 1-2 papers with code done in a year, targeting NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, etc. At the end of your fellowship, if the threshold for refereed publication is unmet we will expect a final report, which may be published as a blog post. Full details are available at: (imachines dot com slash imi-ai-ml-fellowships-2025-2026-high-risk-research) Please note that if you are unable to find this page on our website you will be unable to correctly answer the questions required to submit an application, and your application will be automatically discarded.

Deadline:

Admitting fellows in two cohorts. Deadlines for consideration: April 1 and September 1 2026. 3 week decision period. Rolling thereafter.

Compensation:

competitive location-adjusted stipend, conference and travel support for conferences with accepted papers.

After the fellowship:

past fellows have stayed on in full-time roles at IMI or co-founded AI unicorns. This is a selective process, so we claim little credit for their success. However, we will support your next steps.

Selection criteria:

novelty and importance, clarity of approach, feasibility given time/compute, alignment with topics. Panel review and one interview.

Using AI:

Coding agents are useful tools. We provide access to the top models, and were early adopters of evals-first development flows. Familiarity with coding using agents is part of all interviews. However, reliability and correctness are critical for us. You will need to read and understand every line of code with your name on it, and it will be reviewed by both people and machines.

Selection is based on merit. We promote equality of opportunity, and welcome applications from anyone with talent, skills and potential. IMI is an equal opportunity employer, and does not discriminate on the basis of age, disability, sex, orientation, race, religion or belief.

Please note that all positions require pre-employment screening, including third-party verification of work history, education, and identity, as well as a final in-person interview and identity verification step, which will be conducted in your country of residence.