Founding the AI & Democracy Foundation — and hiring!
Founding the AI & Democracy Foundation — and hiring!
One particularly unique leadership role focuses on overcoming blockers to the adoption of deliberative processes by frontier AI organizations.
Some exciting news—I’ve started a new organization to dramatically accelerate the work I’ve been writing about in this newsletter, and we are hiring!
Over the past year, I have been exploring the potential for a new organization focused on the primary subject of this newsletter: high-quality deliberative democratic processes for decision-making on AI (and with AI).
I had helped advocate for and support this kind of work with OpenAI, Meta, and others—and now I’ve founded the AI & Democracy Foundation (AIDF) to accelerate these efforts dramatically. We see this work as crucial to provide an alternative to dangerous concentrations of power, navigate the open source question, and maintain democracy in a world increasingly dominated by AI. Our primary focus is to help identify and eliminate blockers across the new ecosystem of organizations working toward this goal—and move that work forward rapidly through targeted funding and advising.
We’ve raised initial funding and built out part of the team, and are now hiring for two critical leadership roles.
The roles
Director of AI Strategy (🐦)
The role: Lead AIDF’s work with AI labs to ensure that they have high-quality, AI-augmented deliberative processes for critical decisions that need democratic legitimacy. Work with the CEO to support a diverse set of organizations working toward a shared roadmap of rapidly accelerating innovation and execution of such processes—including both deliberative AI innovators and deliberative democracy practitioners (many of whom have already implemented their tools and processes with major governments around the world).
The ideal fit: Experience leading complex cross-functional projects in a top-tier tech company / frontier AI lab — including projects with significant technical components; can plan, lead, and execute such projects independently; deep knowledge of the AI ecosystem including technical capabilities, risks, and governance; and experience building and maintaining an ecosystem of relationships.
Head of Operations (🐦) [We are no longer accepting applications for this role.]
The role: Lead strategic operations as we build and grow AIDF. Own and rapidly execute on all of the critical operational tasks needed for launching and managing the organization; and supporting its critical research, grantmaking, advocacy, and convening workstreams. (We may close applications for this role within the next week.)
The ideal fit: Very strong operational leadership background, experience managing teams, recruiting skills, past experience in highly dynamic startup environments, a nuanced understanding of the AI ecosystem; interested in transitioning to a managing director or COO over time.
The initial application for both is very short; even someone who is happy in their current role, and without an up-to-date resume can fill it out in several minutes and we’ll follow up if there is a potential fit asking for more detail before the first interview. (We also have a general interest form in case you are interested in other roles, but neither of these are a fit.)
There are many other updates since my last newsletter. A few highlights include: wrapping up the initial OpenAI democratic inputs grant program (which led to a number of excellent projects and writeups), working with Metagov to set up another grant program focused on interoperable deliberative tools (using process cards as part of the application), interviews including with the New York Times, and well…several projects incubating at the AI & Democracy Foundation which I’m excited to share more about soon.
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