Epistemic status: These are my observations as someone who recently completed the CEA Career Bootcamp (June 2026), after ~3 months of engagement with EA and AI safety for the first time. I'm an outsider to EA / AI safety space by conventional measures with my enterprise SaaS background, Bangalore location, no research credentials and no prior community involvement. Some of what follows is my direct experience while the rest reflects conversations with others in my bootcamp cohort, a few of of whom are from the Global South. I'm sharing this partly because the bootcamp encouraged it, and partly because a few people in the cohort echoed these thoughts independently. But mostly because I wanted to hear of my blindspots from those more embedded in the ecosystem.
Some points need further work (see the section on “Points which need further work”), but I did not want to hold off sharing till then. So, the most useful thing you could do after reading this is correct me. If you know where the generalist/ops roles actually are, or have seen the geography problem addressed well somewhere, I'd rather know than have this post just sit there by itself.
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The EA/AI safety space feels more alive than almost any other professional or impact-oriented space I've encountered. I say this having spent some time adjacent to social impact circles in India.
A few specific things that stood out:
I likely wouldn't have uncovered most of this - at least not as quickly - without the structured, curated nature of the bootcamp. The bootcamp functions partly as a momentum-builder for people who might otherwise take much longer to get up to speed.
But frustratingly, that momentum gets difficult to sustain. More on that below.
The liveliness and accessibility are real. But they're unevenly distributed.
The overall vibe of the space felt to me like that of a hip part of town with a thriving cafe scene with a lot happening. But a good chunk of it is inaccessible to most people in practice, beyond being able to talk about it online.
A note on diversity efforts: From what I've seen, the community acknowledges the homogeneity problem and has made genuine efforts to address it. But those efforts have so far focused primarily on race and gender rather than on geography, socioeconomic background and educational pedigree. This feels like an incomplete approach. The educational and organisational pipeline currently funnelling people into EA is producing relative homogeneity along dimensions that don't show up in the standard diversity frame.
Through a project called Orbit, I’m testing the hypothesis that structured, curated introductions can help diffuse network capital and opportunity access more broadly which should led to better cross-strata mobility. The bootcamp itself feels like partial evidence that this is possible: it makes opportunities visible to people who wouldn't have found them otherwise.
But if many opportunities are still being shared in closed conversations rather than public town-squares, the question becomes: how do we get those conversations accessible more widely?
I don't have a confident answer. One approach might be starting with a curated introduction layer, using the existing community infrastructure as a foundation. Something like what the CEA bootcamp already partially offers. I'm curious whether others have thought about this, tried it, or have evidence about what has or hasn't worked.
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If you're reading this and thinking "that's not quite right - here's where the generalist roles actually are" or "there are resources for non-Western entrants that you missed" - please comment. That kind of correction is one of the primary reasons I'm posting this rather than keeping it in my notes.
Thanks to @Carson for feedback on an earlier draft.
