The board
- Where
- San Francisco
- Posted
- Aug 31
Pluralis Research works on Protocol Learning: training and serving large models in a fully decentralized way on small consumer-grade devices connected via the internet. Despite being dismissed as infeasible, we have made significant advances on this problem, most recently Agora, a permissionless run that pretrained an 8B model from scratch on consumer GPUs spread over the internet, with no single participant ever holding the full weights (tech report). While many of the core research problems have been solved, Protocol Learning unlocks a series of new challenges.
What you'd do
- Publish in Tier-1 venues: Conduct novel research in Protocol Learning with the explicit goal of publishing in tier-1 ML conferences (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR).
- Own a real problem: Pick a question that blocks Protocol Learning at scale and answer it — the internship is scoped so a foundational paper is a realistic outcome, not a stretch goal.
- This is a 6-month, fixed-term research internship. We only hire in Australia and the US, and visa sponsorship is limited to these countries.
- We work remotely across the world, with the main teams in Australia and North America. You'll need to be comfortable working across timezones.
- Applicants must have professional-level English proficiency (written and spoken).
- Recruiters: we aren't looking for agency support at this time. We'll reach out if we need help.
What they want
- Publication track record (required): Current PhD candidate with at least one publication in top-tier ML venues (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR).
- Research focus: You work in a core technical area relevant to frontier models.
- Technical depth: Strong theoretical understanding of deep learning and distributed systems principles.
- Implementation skills: Proficiency in PyTorch and experience with large-scale training infrastructure.
- Mission alignment: You believe Protocol Learning is the viable third path for collective, trustless, and sovereign AI.