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Notes from West Coast EA retreat

  • What do I want to get out of the retreat?
    • Mostly: make better decisions on what to do about SF AI Safety
    • Maybe: bring up docs & discuss with people
    • Help people start
  • Who do I want to meet with?
    • Adam in CAIS?
    • professional community builder people
    • college students interested in starting projects

Talks

  • EA needs more ops/generalists, by Fran
    • Fran: Need more events people specifically
  • Q&A:
    • Jingyi: mostly people ops at METR
      • Q: Difference between exec assistant/CoS vs ops?
    • Helena:
  • Q: What ops/generalists do you look up to?
    • Sydney — trialing the SF move, make it happen
    • Helena:
      • Agus — social, on twitter, cybersec on the side
      • Niev — social butterfly, ambitious, why aren’t you doing it, fast feedback loops, personable
      • Annie — dream team
      • Rebecca Baron — ex-METR. Hard ops — knows laws, taxes, can pick out fine details (vs soft ops — convening, events)
  • What do you wish you’d known before?
    • Fran: had a rosy picture of “you can just do things”, but surprised at how much of a slog big events can be on the backend. CoI for vendors, checking allergen labels. hiring a photographer — not a complicated contract — is 2 weeks after good?
    • Jingyi: how easily you can shift what you’re doing. be hired as one thing, do something else after a while
      • Fran: hiring is costly, can be 3mo. people want you to stay, want to get you into a role you’re happy with
    • Helena: micro decisions, develop taste after a while. small decisions
  • Computer/STEM backgrounds ⇒ research? Ops with a stem background? Ops vs research?
    • Helena: didn’t like research
  • Why is it hard to hire people in the space?
    • Probably Good: hard to get ops role, but also can’t hire anyone?
    • Fran: HMs for ops: want people who are high context, want a research-y flavor of thinking, but doing ops work, but maybe not particularly correlated
      • Events work: more slog, also more strategy — generalists will code stuff up
  • Which traits are learnable, which ones can’t?
    • Jingyi: hard to learn: executive function, need to be organized
      • Helena: create systems, accountability structures
    • Jingyi: learnable: upward management, give feedback to someone above you, don’t be scared rabbit
    • Fran: try not to be miserable
  • Q: how do you get better at ops skills
    • Discrete projects, “have you done something end to end”
    • brainstorm, scope
    • murphyjitsu: before the event, think about the ways that can go wrong, backchain
  • What % of people do ops?
    • METR — 32 ppl, 5 ppl. Ideally another person doing finance, hiring a COO
    • FAR — similar, events bumps ops to 40-50% of the org.
    • What ways to get more people to do ops?
      • generator
  • Q: Where do you go to learn more, become better at your craft?
  • Volunteering?
    • bringing people on from volunteer team EAG — but don’t want people to be taken advantage of
    • people have fun volunteering at events, see the backend
    • helpful to figure out what it feels like
    • organizing a uni group is like a volunteer thing
  • Career, terminal
    • Org might just want you to be a grantmaker for 10 years

1:1s

  • Carolanne
    • volunteering for Manifest?
  • Steven Veld
    • thinking about starting things, pitched multi-agent coordination stuff
  • Jeremy
    • Berkeley CS kid, talked about AI coding & models, openclaw,
  • Troy
    • thinking about organizing labor. also china
    • pitched IDAIS as a US-china thing
  • Helena
    • planning Generator, helped Rachel with Action Potential; maybe send a list of ops projects
    • Frame Fellowship, has friend who’s interested in making tiktoks, might be interested in Frame retro
      • critique: more indie tiktokers, less partnering with existing AIS orgs
      • Tiktoks of METR videos?
    • reads, utopia/gentle romance, pitched Naomi Novik
  • Ann
    • Biz student at Stanford
  • Kai Chen
    • Side projects, website
    • Also from china
  • Aiden Kim
    • Starting a SAIP-like org out of CAIS
      • Strategic considerations like MAD, within AI
    • had started a startup raised 2.1 then 5m
  • Jesse
    • Notion consulting
    • Generalist at Kairos
    • Talk to “Matthew” about an internship, Manifest?
  • Nathan
    • optimized mountain bikes to sell
    • trying to get into entrepreneurship at UCLA
      • come to SF?
  • Sandrine
    • Pivoting from legal work (M&A) to maybe animal welfare (textiles, leather substitute) thing

Follow up with:

  • Fran for FAR, events?
  • Marcus on director of animal welfare?