“A personal take on why (and why not) to work on Open Philanthropy’s AI teams” by cb

You may have noticed that Open Philanthropy is hiring for several roles in our GCR division: senior generalists across our global catastrophic risks team, and grantmakers for our technical AI safety team. (We're also hiring for recruiting and operations roles! I know very little about either field, so I'm not going to talk about them here.) I work as a grantmaker on OP's AI governance team, and inspired by Lizka's recent excellent post giving her personal take on working at Forethought, I wanted to share some personal takes on reasons for and against working on the AI teams at Open Philanthropy. A few things to keep in mind as you read this: I'm mostly going to talk about personal fit and the day-to-day experience of working at OP, rather than getting into high-level strategy and possible disagreements people might have with it. On strategy: if you have some substantive big picture disagreements with OP's approach, I think that firstly, you're in good company (this describes many OP staff!), and secondly, you'd still enjoy working here. But if you disagree with many of our strategic choices, or have especially foundational or basic disagreements, you'd probably be kind of miserable working here. [...] ---Outline:(01:36) The case for working at Open Philanthropys AI team(01:46) Impact(02:19) Now is an especially exciting time to work on AI safety and governance(02:54) Were currently capacity constrained(03:17) My colleagues are very cool and very nice(03:55) Internal disagreement and developing your own views(04:59) Support for professional development(05:36) Culture(06:52) Some downsides/possible reasons not to apply(06:57) General considerations about grantmaking (and grantmaking-enabling roles) vs direct work(09:44) If youre very much in research/figuring things out mode(11:23) Risk of your takes atrophying(11:59) Social dynamics and funding relationships(13:11) Feedback loops and uncertainty(14:10) Slowness(14:28) Capacity constraints and difficulty switching off(15:28) Imposter syndrome?(16:52) Career progression?(17:58) Mostly remote work (more specific to AIGP)(18:45) So should you apply? --- First published: November 7th, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/JSJRCGpaQAkjnqn7L/a-personal-take-on-why-and-why-not-to-work-on-open --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.