Talent Commons

During the Generator Residency I built Talent Commons, a platform that connects people interested in working on AI safety with the organizations and programs looking for them. We help applicants stay easily discoverable across the AIS ecosystem when new roles and programs open up, and we help organizations source the most promising talent coming out of every program, fellowship, and hiring round.

Coming into Generator, I didn't have a ton of context on what the most impactful problems to be working on in AI safety were. This was largely just because I didn't have a clear sense of what the field of AI safety was up to, beyond what you'd get out of a BlueDot course. Working out of Constellation was invaluable for building rapid context on the field and finding out how I could contribute best.

For why Talent Commons specifically, I specifically wanted to build something that was clearly impactful / addressing a real problem in the ecosystem, and where the impact would be diffuse across the entire ecosystem + compound over a longer period of time. Talent is one of the binding constraints to reducing x-risk, and yet the current state of talent sourcing and routing in AI safety is horrendous.

1. There are thousands of promising people who come through AI safety programs like MATS, Astra Fellows, BlueDot courses, SPAR, Global Challenges Project, the Generator Residency, etc.
2. There are hundreds of strong people who get rejected from one program (often due to reasons like capacity constraints), and then routinely disappear from view.
3. If you've run a hiring round, program, or fellowship before, you know how difficult sourcing and routing talent can be. Currently the status quo relies on ad-hoc referrals, one-off data requests, and messy CSVs and Airtables passed between organizations in a dozen different formats, all of which cost time on both sides.

Since Generator, I've joined Kairos full-time to continue working on Talent Commons. After building out the core platform, I'm now focused on scaling up the pilot to more organizations. Our goal is for the right people to get routed to the right roles in AIS where they can have the most impact!