Jan 2, 2026

I spent 15 hours on ARENA and decided it’s not for me

These are some loose thoughts on my experience that I wanted to cache, mostly if my future self starts wondering whether to do ARENA!

ARENA is one of the top recommended courses for getting into AI safety research. I enjoyed what I did complete because:

• It was very structured. It gives you the info you need to decide how you want to approach the curriculum, whether that means improving on some fundamentals or skipping through certain sections. You just need to follow along the curriculum and you won’t feel lost on where to go next.
• It’s very practical. You’re constantly doing exercises to build and test your understanding. You read a small amount of theory to be oriented, but for the most parts you’re learning by running the code yourself and just seeing what happens when you make small changes.
• There’s support for self-study. ARENA has a self-study Slack community where people have ask questions that other’s in the community proactively respond to.

But I decided to stop because:

It took me way longer than expected to get through.

I read this guide which estimated it would take me more than a day to get through 0.0. It took me almost 2 days and I only get 3/4 of the way through.

I did data science in undergrad 3 years ago and felt pretty confident in my Python coding, but I underestimated how much I’ve forgotten about linear algebra and calculus since then.

The other chapters are meant to take about the same time, so at the rate I was going I’d need another week before I can start training my own neural network.

I felt demotivated.

Math and I have a tough relationship…

I got enough utility from it for my role.

I currently lead the the Technical AI Safety course at BlueDot. I feel like I understand enough about what ARENA entails in terms of time, coding experience and math understanding to be able to advise graduates from our courses on whether to do it.

I don’t think the additional granularity on what the course is like that I’d get from spending another 100+ hours is worth it. (though I could be wrong!)

If I did decide to pick ARENA up again, I’d:

Get a mentor.

Using Cline was helpful, but it isn’t as good at telling me which bits I really needed to understand and which I could skim over. Someone who has done the curriculum before might be better placed to advise me as I’m working through it.

Move on more quickly.

I was very fixated on understanding every concept very deeply and perhaps that was the wrong approach! I should have looked at the solutions sooner and worked backwards instead of trying to reason about it in my head.