GenerAISts

AI safety is maturing, but its talent pipeline for operations, org-building and research management professionals may not be keeping up. GenerAISts aims to map the generalist gap in AIS and build an intervention to address it.

What started as a one-person mentee project within the incubator has grown into a two-person team with a mentor, a published EA Forum post and a post-incubation validation-to-intervention plan. Biased toward recognising the gap from personal experience and toward an early intervention hypothesis, we deliberately focused the incubation on validating the problem before locking in on a solution.

Throughout the programme, we ran 12 semi-structured interviews (including 1 written response) with AIS org leaders across field-building, governance and technical research. The EA Forum post documented analysis of 8 of these interviews alongside prior research (15+ published sources, ~10 conversations with transitioning generalists). It attracted 350+ reads and 40+ upvotes, generating comments and contact form responses supporting our post-incubation validation.

We found that the pathway into AIS for generalists approaching from outside the community may be structurally unreliable, referrals may dominate hiring, and the problem is experienced unevenly across the ecosystem. Two adjacent patterns also emerged: a broader shortage of senior professionals with outside-world operational fluency, and fragile or missing institutional infrastructure in some organisations. The full six observations can be found in the post.

Post-incubation, we will complete interviews with underrepresented technical AIS organisations, narrow our observations to the most important, tractable and neglected problem, and begin testing our intervention hypothesis against it.