TLDR:
The field of AI safety is bottlenecked on talent. Running recruitment processes is expensive and time-consuming. Freelancers are overlooked. Hiring freelancers can provide a way to quickly and cheaply test a person's fit within an org, and vice versa. Plus, real work gets completed, and freelancers get both compensation and a portfolio piece.
Last week, I wrote about my experience of transitioning into AI safety as a generalist in 2026. Immediately after hitting post, I checked my email and had my first offer for paid work in the field. Reading all of the comments from other generalists sharing their experiences on my last post, I felt very lucky to have some return on the time and effort I have invested into this transition.
One thing I keep thinking is that if I were looking for a full-time role, I would probably not have received an offer at this point. It is much less costly for an organisation to pay for a couple of days of work from a freelancer than it is to hire for a full-time role. If the person isn't a good fit for the org, some mediocre work is created, but the org wouldn't be at a huge loss. A couple of my conversations at EAG London 2026 went something like:
In the best case scenario of an org hiring a freelancer, the project goes well, the freelancer gets paid, and real work gets completed that the org wouldn't have been able to complete otherwise, i.e. counterfactual impact is created. Even better, this could lead to ongoing freelance work or a full-time role, either with the original org or another org to which they were able to refer the freelancer.
In London two weeks ago, I spoke to Maja Webster Nenadov, who founded Freelancing for Good. She was very surprised to hear from multiple EA orgs that they had not considered hiring freelancers to plug the gap between the work they wanted to do and their current capacity. When I shared insights from the reading I had done about the need for generalists in AI safety, we agreed that solving this problem could help with the talent bottleneck.
I'm exploring the potential for a project/org that will help AI safety orgs to hire those looking for work in the field as freelancers/contractors. I have a lot of unknowns to figure out and have begun to schedule calls with many of the generalists who commented on my post last week in order to figure these out. I also want to speak to hiring managers or anyone else who has a good sense of why orgs aren't hiring more freelancers.
Some of the questions I want to get answered by generalists:
Some of the questions I want to get answered by hiring managers:
If you believe you are well-positioned to answer any of these questions, please feel free to leave a comment, message me privately, or schedule a meeting where we can talk more freely. Further thoughts:
This project idea is still very much in its infancy, and the form that any solution may take is still unknown. I wanted to share some ideas for what it could look like anyway:
Adjacent project idea: