“MATS 9 Retrospective & Advice” by beyarkay

I couldn’t find a recent write-up from a MATS alum about what attending MATS was like, so this is the thing that I wish I had. I attended MATS from January to March 2026, on Team Shard with Alex Turner and Alex Cloud. It was a great time! Applications for MATS are basically on a rolling basis nowadays, and I can strongly recommend applying (to multiple streams) even if you think you’re not a great match. With that being said, there's a lot I wish I knew going into MATS, so here's a brain-dump of thoughts. It's not extremely polished, but I expect it’ll be useful nonetheless (none of this is endorsed by MATS, just my thoughts): Work ethic I think most mentees were working 10-12, sometimes 14 hours a day Mon-Fri, and probably 2-8 hours on Saturday and Sunday, often going out on some adventure or party on the weekend. Exactly which hours people worked varied wildly. I usually worked 8:30am/9am to 11pm/midnight, with breaks during the day, others worked from midday into the early hours of the morning. This was surprisingly sustainable (IMO); MATS puts a lot of effort into removing all other blockers that you normally [...] ---Outline:(00:50) Work ethic(01:29) Use more compute(02:20) Research requires a lot of compute(03:12) Applying for jobs during MATS (dont do it)(04:55) The serious people are in War Mode(05:44) Do you feel the AGI?(06:00) Burn rate, efficiency, and decisions(07:12) insider information(08:08) Names & Faces(08:20) Fellows(08:50) Useful tools(11:19) Use more Claudes(12:06) Build nice helper utilities for yourself(12:59) MATS-mentee-mentor dynamics(13:45) Working with your mentors(14:27) Research managers(14:48) Ops requests(15:38) Non-MATS events(16:17) Team Shard(17:12) Weekly updates(18:46) Keep a log of your mistakes(19:06) My running-experiments setup(27:51) Lighthaven(28:12) Getting setup with the Compute team --- First published: May 15th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/eFD3rozNCZKMe4rTs/mats-9-retrospective-and-advice --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.