Table of Contents: Recap (AIS Career Pivot OH, New to EA + Coworking), Upcoming Events (Stop the AI Race Protest, Breaking Barriers SF Hackathon, AIS Career Fair), Resources & Opportunities (Apply to EAGx NOW!, Stop RSI, Founding & Funding, Opportunities in the Bay Area), Member Spotlight (Hi Rohan)
Recap
🧑🚀 AIS Career Pivot Office Hours
In early June, we hosted AIS Career Pivot Office Hours that had a great turnout of individuals eager to learn more about safe AI for humanity or uncover roadblocks to pivoting.
Some overarching advice:
Don't over-index on one path: your side project or a specific program/role or networking. You need to maintain a pulse on 2-3 in order to achieve the next thing.
As a rule, while you're networking, always ask for a warm introduction. This will lead you to a chain of people who know you.
These articles are my primary recommendations:
I’m always available to chat 1-1 to talk through your uncertainties and help direct: https://tinyurl.com/easf-form
⭐ New to EA Event + Coworking Meetup
We had strong turnout at the newcomers meetup (~30 people with varying degrees of prior engagement). I gave a small talk and found Ajeya Cotra’s intro talk deeply inspiring to reset on the soul of what EA is about.
The first few minutes would suffice: check it out here.
For Friday coworking, the crew spanned AI safety research (agent design, evals, interpretability, adversarial trust), animal welfare and food systems (alt-protein, AI x animal welfare residencies, wildfire/climate risk modeling), and the community infrastructure holding it together.
Full list of who's working on what and what they want to talk about is here: tinyurl.com/easf-cowork. Reach out directly!
Upcoming Events
🤖 Stop The AI Race Protest
Sat, July 11 | [Underrated & Neglected Impact Opportunity] Taken from MIRI, Anthropic published a blog post warning of the dangers of recursive self-improvement: when AI improves itself ever more quickly, advancing its capabilities without human oversight. In their post, the company stated the importance of a global pause on frontier AI development. Join a critical mass to signal the importance of pause. Partiful here.
🏗️ Hackathon: Breaking Barriers in AI Safety
Sat, July 18 | The AI Safety ecosystem is growing faster than traditional on-ramps allow. In partnership with BlueDot & Mox, this hackathon is built to address the disconnect for Generalists & Builders over Researchers - they will be given priority acceptance.
No coding required, no expert background expected | just show up with a laptop and get hands-on with a real project, solo or on a team, either from suggested prompts or your own idea. It's a full day (9:30 AM–8 PM) with breakfast, lunch, dinner, mentors & a hack clinic if you get stuck, and prizes up to 💰$1k for top teams.
Check out their AI Safety Compass beforehand to build a game plan.
🤝 AI Safety Career Fair & Pivot Summit
Fri, July 24 | AI capabilities are advancing faster than the safety talent ecosystem can keep up. Successif estimates it takes 6 to 16 months to land an AI safety role. The bottleneck isn't motivation or money: it's people, organizations, and the connective tissue between them. This summit is one day of that connective tissue.
The day runs workshops, ecosystem discussions, mingling, and an open-floor career fair to have direct conversations with people doing the hiring. Event Link.
If you’re hiring now or in the future, Sign up here to register your organization
If you’d like to help out on the day-of, Sign up here to volunteer
Adjacent Events (On the Calendar)
Sat, Jul 4 | 🧠 ACX First Saturdays
Tues, Jul 7 | 📖 AI Safety Evals - Paper Reading Club
Wed, Jul 8 | 🐾 AI & Animals: Documentary Screening & Q&A with Oscar Horta
Fri, Jul 10 | 💊 Training reasoning models and agents for drug discovery
Fri, Jul 10 | 🌊 Can Just Save Shrimps: Winning Campaigns for Neglected Species with ICAW
Sat, Jul 11 | 🐶 Animals x AI #9
Mon, Jul 13 | 📖 9030 club reading "Qwen Agent World": #60 - ML Paper Reading Group
Tue, Jul 14 | 🍍 Mox Movie Night #7: Chungking Express
Wed, Jul 22 | 🤖 Keenan Pepper / AE Studio — LLM Introspection
Fri, Aug 21-23 | 🌐 EAGxBerkeley 2026
Resources & Opportunities
[Due Aug 7] Apply to EAGxBerkeley 🌹
Aug 21-23 | Take 5 min to apply to EAGxBerkley to help the team plan 🙂 I (and many others) had a great time at EAGxBerkeley 2024 - the vibes are less strict than the larger conference & the connection are local, so you run into familiar faces in a cozy atmosphere. Don’t miss out! 🔥
5 min | Stop Recursive Self-Improvement
MIRI | Anthropic’s statement on a global pause is currently all over the news. You can help the idea gain traction by calling or writing your political representatives as soon as you can. If you’re in the US, this would be your representatives and senators. Your message can be as simple as:
I’m calling to ask [Name of elected official] to advocate for a global pause on frontier AI development. We don’t yet know how to reliably steer these systems, and we can’t continue plowing ahead. Please speak up publicly in favor of an international agreement to pause frontier AI development.
Founding & Funding Hub 💸 Get that Cash
Programs & Grants
[Due July 10] Surplus Incubator - startups for massive public good
[Due July 8 & 12] Sentient Futures Project Incubator - Call for mentors & mentee
[Due July 13] Grantmaking.ai - $5k-$50k round to fund projects aimed at reducing x-risk from AI, including career changes and exploratory work.
[Due July 24] AI Safety Camp Virtual Research Incubator
[Due July 26] Cosmos Grants - AI for Truth Seeking & Human Autonomy
[Due Sep 30] Foresight Institute’s AI for Science & Safety Nodes Grant
[Rolling] Free Compute from Verifiable Compute Foundation + Lucid Computing
[Rolling] Emergent Ventures - for Moonshots
[Rolling] Leo’s experimental microgranting program - projects to make AGI go well for humanity
[Rolling] Halcyon Futures - Request for Founders
Request For Proposal
[Due July 21] Checks and Balances - for designing the institutional infrastructure of an AI-era democracy
[Rolling] Coefficient Giving’s Programs & Events for Global Catastrophic Risks & Capacity Building for Transformative AI
[Rolling] BlueDot Impact’s Rapid Grants for quick funding to ship projects, run events, and do other concrete work on AI safety and biosecurity (3 days turnaround)
[Rolling] From Longview Philanthropy, Extreme Power Concentration and [July 24] Applied Work for Digital Minds
[Rolling] Institute for Progress’ The Launch Sequence- an initiative to develop projects that prepare the world for advanced AI.
Opportunities in the SF Bay Area
🟢 Hiring: MATS, Midas Project, Resolution, SL5 Task Force, Epoch AI, Secure AI Project
Collaboration Network for AIS Projects:
Join the new Career Transition Slack Channel of the Bay Area EA Slack for more timely updates on opportunities 🙂
Mangrove.One (Early Access Pilot)
📑 Fully-funded Courses & Programs (Not in Bay Area):
[Due July 8] Heron AI Security Research Fellowship
[Due July 15] AI Security Bootcamp London
[Due July 12] ARENA 9.0 in London
[Due July 22] Horizon Public Service Rapid Response Fellowship
Member Spotlight
👋 Meet Rohan!
🧑⚖️ Talk to me about… Political advocacy, democracy reforms, Olivia Rodrigo, my blog www.rohanprasad.org. Reach out at [email protected]
🇺🇸 What do you care about? I care about democracy in the age of AI! Our political system is at the heart of many important issues, like AI safety or animal welfare, and I hope we can make it better.
👣 Fun fact I run barefoot and think you should too!
📚 What’s a book that’s been a game changer?
JD Vance, Hillbilly Elegy is really worth the read. Also, the Autobiography of Malcolm X. Similar stories in many ways.
Whew! Let’s breathe
“The size and age of the cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home, the Earth.
For the first time we have the power to determine the fate of our planet, and ourselves. This is a time of great danger, but our species is young and curious and brave. It shows much promise. In the last few millennia we have made the most astonishing and unexpected discoveries about the cosmos, and our place within it.
I believe our future depends powerfully on how we understand this cosmos; in which we float, like a mote of dust, in the morning sky.”
