Working in tech driven by a childhood passion and donating the majority of my income. Exploring working on compute governance in my free time.
Was seeking a community of people trying to optimize their impact and made the above decisions after engaging with EA core ideas.
I think it’s fair to say that entry into AI/ML is difficult. I just checked recently if 80k themselves acknowledge this, and they do!
Cons
Due to a shortage of managers, it’s difficult to get jobs and might take you some time to build the required career capital and expertise
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Any recommendation to the juniors on where/how to gain career capital with more capacity?
Also adding Rethink Priorities’ pilot of personalized donation advice (signup form here) that I found in their 2025 Results, 2026 Plans and Funding Needs document (shared also on their website and in an EA forum post).
I’ve had a call with them this week, and they are working on establishing support for cause-neutral individual donors. I’d recommend reaching out to them if you are interested.
Adding OpenPhil (now Coefficieng Giving) new donor advising (from $250k/yr):
https://coefficientgiving.org/research/open-philanthropy-is-now-coefficient-giving/
I forwarded the post to Nina from HIP. But I’d recommend you also reach out to them directly: https://www.highimpactprofessionals.org/contact-us
Don’t have specific ideas in mind but there’s definitly decent overlap. I think having a call about what they see as gaps and how HIE could fill these would be very valuable.
Great to see someone talking about this!
Would be very interested to see something tackling the same topic on AI Safety.
Please link if already exists.
Great to see this being picked up! Two questions from me:
Have you considered collaborating with High-Impact Professionals?
Why the community space being gibhub instead of slack (which seems to be more widely used in EA)?
I’d love to see more of the community encouraging people to allocate dedicated time to community/peer support. (Would be awsome to see some research on how this may impact the productivity of a team)
But also, aren’t the EA communities underorganized in general on peer support? Yes, people should be proactive in finding mentors, mentees and peers. But I think the efficiency would also benefit from processes:
Hiring processes to find promising mentees
Matchmaking processes to find mentors who can help you best
Curated peer groups (of those who participate in the two above). This could help form a community of people who are orherwise scattered across different universities or companies (vs. class mates or collegues in a company naturally spending time together)
I’m seeing peer group organizing going on locally, but honestly, to me, it seems to mostly focus on the inclusion factor (which is also important) and leaves the efficient peer support part unaddressed.
Have you considered shaping supply/demand balance with career choices? Sometimes dynamics might be such that getting a marginal additional role filled in a field (just by market forces) would require a large amount of money to be spent (i.e. you need to increase the salaries of everyone in the field). Whereas you can simply increase the supply and get the role filled at current market rates.
Could you elaborate more on the 10-20% slack? What counts as slack and what benefit you expect?
But keep applying, and keep pushing forward!
Is it also a good use of the 5000 aplicant’s time? Could there be clear bars someone should meet to have non-negligible chance? Shouldn’t many focus on upskilling outside the bubble instead?
sent a DM!
Hi Steve,
My background is in computer chip component (IP) design and verification, so it is likely not particularly useful for physical projects.
But have you come across: https://tampersec.com/#get-in-touch ?
Adding the new service of Longview here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/WRGBW8DMNhRGWA9xB/longview-is-now-offering-ai-grant-recommendations-to-donors-1
I think the usual path at the start is depicted accurately. Companies try to avoid investing in many people so labour with a given skill/experience is often scarse resource. In my industry, experienced people are approached with a new opportunity (many from well-known firms in the field) each week by headhunters without even asking for it. So when you get the message that work is needed in AI, the natural reaction is “just tell me where I should apply” and the answer usually is the 80k job board or similar. There is a gap there.
So I really like the Visualising your journey figures, I think these help a lot to set appropriate expectations. (I personally spent 5-15h/w on my transition in the last two years and still waiting for the first offer which meets the bar I’ve set for myself.)
So far, I mostly felt the lack of context limiting in the early days when I was actually trying to gain more context. The reason I think was similar (opportunities like 80k advising and EAGx also exected significant context). This makes sense, but I think there’s room for improvement by being more transparent saying things like “we expect this opportunity to be most useful for (and hence prioritizing) people with basic knowledge about EA e.g. after doing the intro course” Note that I think my background (hardware) puts me in the nieche bucket so context not coming up as a limiting factor in job applications aligns with the text.
Are there existing cause-agnostic communities of donors? I’d be interested to join.
Is there a proposed/proven way of coordinating on the prioritization?
Without a good feedback loop I can imagine the majority of the people just jump on the same path which could then run into diminishing returns if there isn’t sufficient capacity.
It would be intersting to see at least the number of people at different career stages on a given path. I assume some data should be available from regular surveys. And maybe also some estimates on the capacity of different paths.
And I assume the career coaching services likely have an even more detailed picture including missing talent/skills/experience that they can utilize for more personalized advice.
I’d encourage you to consider separating your personal runway from your donations. Even if you are thinking of taking career breaks/pay cuts to invest in yourself for a higher overall impact you may even want to separate these from your personal safety-net bucket.
Otherwise I think you listed the main points. I’d only add that if you are happy to trust expert grantmakers you can donate now to normal funds (may not help with cause are prioritization though but I think you may find some expert opions on that also) or patient funds (e.g. Founders Pledge Patient Philanthropy Fund) as well and let them take care of the rest.
When I tried to look for advice on investing a few months earlier I only found a few relevant posts with detailed advice. Of those I found this one the most useful (check appendixes as well): https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/YjN6cGoXxPZeqCh4Z/eas-and-ea-orgs-should-move-cash-from-low-interest-to-high
You may also search for “impact investing” about minimizing bad / maximizing good of your investments. I personally felt that it does not worth the effort of going deep into this.
Great to hear there’s work in progress on this! Looking forward to it!
Also thanks for the suggestions, will try to get the most out of these!
I think Patient philanthropy and Career capital are valid reasons (not sure about backfire risks).
I’d also highlight that the claim “funding is not the main bottleneck” does not imply that more funding is useless.
And importantly, I think another key part of the 80k advice is to find something you are really good at. So I think the career path priority list should be treated as a starting point that you should first adjust to your own strengths and interests, and then explore through experiments. Start with cheap tests and don’t dismiss a great opportunity that is a few items below in the priority list.
If you are considering being a dentist (over alternative EtG paths), then you may already have signals that suggest you’d do well as a dentist. If that’s the case, then I think you should also consider Biorisk as a career path. (Starting with reading about it / talking to people who think it’s an important problem, if you have not done this already).