Alex Rutherford

PhD in AI & 🤖 @GOALS_oxford @FLAIR_Ox | also @TolkienLecture 🧙‍♂️ | he/him | 🦋amacrutherford

[Jakob Foerster @j_foerst]

We are again recruiting @bold_lab_ai - please share the love 🙏. We are looking for:
1) Postdocs (https://t.co/jqmfzk0W7H) -- deadline 9th of Oct at noon
2) research assistants (https://t.co/ittyN0e9NT) -- deadline 9th of Oct at noon
3) Strategic Partnership Project Manager (https://t.co/oYE6j8D7n5) -- deadline 14th of Oct at noon

[Charlie Harris @charlieharris01]

The UK’s most powerful government-built AI supercomputer, Isambard-AI, cost £225m

The Botley Road bridge cost roughly the same

Apparently our frontier AI capacity and one bridge are comparable national investments

[Edoardo Contente @edoardocontente]

There is a super shady data control setting on everyone's ChatGPT which makes it seem like your data can be used for training even if you explicitly say to *NOT* improve the model for everyone (1/9)

[Alex Rutherford @alexrutherford0]

RT @j_foerst: We recently hosted our first BOLD Festival in Oxford, brining together 350 researchers, innovators, industry partners, VCs an…

[Alex Rutherford @alexrutherford0]

Come join us!

[Jakob Foerster @j_foerst]

TL;DR: This is one of the most important and exciting opportunities in AI on the planet - please read on.

The British Open-ended Learning & Discovery Lab is creating the perfect place for paradigm breaking AI research in the name of open-source and open-science. We have agency, we funding, we have unprecedented amounts of compute*, but WE NEED YOU!

..and we have created the dream job for you: The BOLD Fellow. This job combines a fast-moving, high agency, collaborative environment with full academic freedom and a salary that pays the bills.

Apply by noon UK time on the 15th of September for this once in a lifetime opportunity to shape the history of our field and of our planet:
https://t.co/wN009tQEkt

*by academic standards

[Alex Rutherford @alexrutherford0]

An open-ended world for LLM agent teams where coordination is a distinct axis of difficulty, separate from base-task skill!

[Kale-ab Tessera @KaliTessera]

Can LLM agents coordinate in long-horizon, open-ended worlds?

We evaluate 13 modern LLMs in a new benchmark where agents must work together to explore, communicate, trade resources, craft tools, build structures, and fight mobs.

TL;DR: Most agents struggle, averaging only ~6% normalised return. Yet on the hardest setting, zero-shot Gemini 3.1 Pro performs comparably to the best MARL agent trained for 1 billion environment steps.

More broadly, we find coordination is a distinct bottleneck beyond long-horizon task competence, with communication having the largest effect in our harness ablations. 🧵👇

[British Open-ended Learning and Discovery Lab @bold_lab_ai]

We hope you’ve enjoyed a sneak peek of work from BOLD and our collaborators at #ICML2026! See below for a full summary of where you can find us this week:

▶️ (Poster) Procedural Generation of Algorithm Discovery Tasks in Machine Learning, Hall A #1803, Tuesday 10:30 - 12:15, led by @AlexDGoldie

▶️ (Poster) h1: Bootstrapping LLMs to Reason over Longer Horizons via Reinforcement Learning, Hall A #2704, led by Alesia Ivanova @sumeetrm

▶️ (Poster) Goal-Conditioned Agents that Learn Everything All at Once, Hall A #310, Tuesday 14:00 - 15:45, led by @mitrma

▶️ (Poster) Rubric Curriculum RL: Exploiting the Generation-Verification Gap in Creative Writing, Hall A #2605, Wednesday 14:30 - 14:15, led by Tejas Krishnan @sumeetrm

▶️ (Poster) Evolution Strategies at the Hyperscale, Hall A #3712, Thursday 10:30 - 12:15, led by @bidiptas13 @JuanDuquevan Mattie Fellows

▶️ (Poster) Dreaming in Code for Curriculum Learning in Open-Ended Worlds, Hall A #213, Wednesday 17:00 - 18:45, led by @k_mitsides

▶️ (Poster) Evolution Strategies at the Hyperscale, Hall A #3712, Thursday 10:30 - 12:15, led by @bidiptas13 @JuanDuquevan Mattie Fellows

▶️ (Poster) The Decrypto Benchmark for Multi-Agent Reasoning and Theory of Mind, Hall A #3504, Thursday 14:30 - 16:15, led by @_andreilupu

▶️ (Poster) LongCoT: Benchmarking Long-Horizon Chain-of-Thought Reasoning, Hall A #1705, Thursday 14:30 - 16:15, led by @sumeetrm @DanielNichols10 @CharlieLondon02 Peggy Li Fabio Pizzati

▶️ (Talk) Superhuman Scientific Discovery, RLxF Worskhop, Friday 15:30 - 16:00, by @robertarail

▶️ (Panel) RLxF Worskhop, Friday 16:00 - 17:00, by @robertarail

▶️ (Workshop) Amortising Bayesian Experimental Design for Sequential Information Gathering in LLMs, FoGen Workshop, Friday, led by @jakobhartmann99 James Harvey Jhonathan Navott

▶️ (Workshop) Elicitation Format Drives Divergent LLM Geopolitical Forecasts, AI Forecasting Workshop, Saturday, led by @hariharansuhas @michalbravansky

▶️ (Workshop) EGGROLL-IPO: Pluralistic Alignment via Decentralised Post-Training with Population Preferences, Pluralistic Alignment Workshop, Saturday, led by @alfie_lamerton

▶️ (Workshop Spotlight) Abstraction for Offline Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning, DEMO Workshop, Saturday, led by @ClarisseWibault

[British Open-ended Learning and Discovery Lab @bold_lab_ai]

Hello world :)
We are BOLD — the British Open-ended Learning and Discovery Lab!

BOLD is a new academic research lab fully focussed on paradigm breaking discoveries in fundamental AI. We work towards more efficient & open AI that is built around human needs and capabilities.

To pursue these breakthroughs, we pioneer new modes of collaboration in academia that are more focussed, resourced, agile, and collaborative. Rather than fragmenting resources, today we are sunsetting 5 of the UKs leading AI labs to join forces under our joined scientific vision.

Our vision is centered around three pillars:
⚡ Beyond backpropagation – questioning the foundations of the field.
🤝 Human-centric learning & discovery – treating humans as core to our algorithms
🤖 Embodied learning – fast learning and adapting methods that deal with the messy real world

BOLD is backed by @UKRI_News and @EPSRC with £30M – and this is just the beginning. We are urgently looking for partners and sponsors to 10x this.

👉 https://t.co/eFVFW31mqz

👉 https://t.co/Eoad4G18KL

@j_foerst, @CULLYAntoine, @tonizza82, @shimon8282, @tonizza82, Ani Calinescu & @_rockt

[The J.R.R. Tolkien Lecture on Fantasy Literature @TolkienLecture]

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this year's Tolkien Lecture, 'On Fantasy', delivered by @BrandSanderson! If you missed it live, the full recording is now available on YouTube. Don't miss this insightful discussion of the role and significance of fantasy literature.

[The Prince and Princess of Wales @KensingtonRoyal]

Amazing night!! Huge congratulations to all the players, team,staff and everyone connected to the club! 44 years since the last taste of European silverware!

Special shout out to Boubacar Kamara who has been out injured but is such an integral part of our team and helped lay the foundations of this success.

UTV! 💪🏻❤️ VTID
W

[The Villa Podcast @TheVillaPodcast]

Scoring screamers is unsustainable.

[Henry Winter @henrywinter]

Really enjoying Aston Villa staging the Europa League Goal of the Season competition tonight. #FREAVL

[Alex Rutherford @alexrutherford0]

@alexUnder_sky Yea good shout

[Alex Rutherford @alexrutherford0]

Gearing up for jaxmarl 2.0, bringing it up to date with the latest JAX versions. If you use it and have suggestions for improvements, do shout!

We also just hit 800 stars on github 🎉

[Alex Rutherford @alexrutherford0]

What a man Unai Emery is

[Jacob Tanswell @J_Tanswell]

OH MY. EMI BUENDIA WITH SECONDS LEFT.

Villa Park goes berserk. Villa Park is a fortress.

2-1.

#AVFC

[Alex Rutherford @alexrutherford0]

@holland_tom history of villa coming when?

[Jakob Foerster @j_foerst]

My Oxford lab (@FLAIR_Ox ) is hiring Phd students! If you are thinking of doing a Phd in blue-sky and -sort of crazy ambitious- ML and have a technically strong background and love to work with others, please consider all options for joining us:
1) Direct entry - deadline is the 1st of Dec AOE (https://t.co/lgLZdUXJpA)
2) AIMS CDT (https://t.co/L0dDvIGiAP) deadline on 27th of Jan 2026 AOE
3) EIT CDT (https://t.co/8xfPKHM4AJ) deadline on the 7th of Jan 2026 AOE

Student funding is a real constraint / concern in the UK (especially for overseas students) and by applying for these three programs you can maximize your chances of ending up in a very very special place.

[Alex Goldie @AlexDGoldie]

1/ 🕵️ Algorithm discovery could lead to huge AI breakthroughs! But what is the best way to learn or discover new algorithms?

I'm so excited to share our brand new @rl_conference paper which takes a step towards answering this! 🧵

[nathan monette @nathanrmonette]

Excited to announce my first paper, with @j_foerst and @FLAIR_Ox, was accepted into @rl_conference 2025!

We establish a new UED method called NCC that obtains strong performance based on principles of optimisation theory.