Just saw that this is still being updated, as of early 2026. How amazing!

Alicia is great, working with her on building this organisation sounds like a great opportunty. I hope you get a lot of applications!

Awesome, good luck on your AI Safety journey. In addition to mine, I recommend these articles:

• How Unofficial Work Gets You Hired: Building Your Surface Area for Serendipity
• There is No EA Sorting Hat
• Your Goal Isn’t Really to Get a Job
• Stop Applying And Get To Work
• Why experienced professionals fail to land high-impact roles (FBB #5) (Just putting this here because I want to be able to quickly share the full list with others.) 
  
   

Thanks for writing this up, great post!

The example of the student is if fair, but my claim is that you can get those effects in cheaper ways than a retreat. For any given community retreat, only a couple people will attend with profiles for which it's realistic that a retreat can help them get a role (see my point about retreats having too low of a bar). I would want to support these in other ways.

I'm worried though that the scale is too small to power an RCT. But I do like your idea on that we should try to measure the effectiveness of these interventions more rigorously!

Maybe I misunderstood, but if retreats and conferences/summits are complements, this argument should not apply?

They might be complementary, but most communities don't have the resources to do both. (Unless they are a year apart, at which point any momentum you get fades).

Thanks for pointing out that we actually have some more data on costs from GSF retreats.

On the other hand, I think the argument of my post is being left unaddressed: that we should prioritise summits over community retreats. As Ollie mentioned above, larger events provide the same benefit per participant. EAGx Conferences may be at a similar cost per participant compared to retreats, but I would be really surprised if the same was true for summits, which are only one day. I would love to get a better sense of how expensive summits are per person thoguh!

I have had the chance to visit Mox recently (not as part of this program), and I strongly recommend that anyone to take advantage of this opportunity. It's an amazing space with value-aligned leadership as well as great members. It was long overdue for SF to have such a co-working space! :)

You’re right that these aren’t the same kinds of events. My claim is about prioritisation under limited time and resources: communities should focus on the events that are more cost-effective.

If a community only has the capacity to run one event per year, I would prefer it to be a summit rather than a retreat. If the community is large enough to run an EAGx, I would prioritise that, and then add a summit around six months later if capacity allows.

I'm not sure if CEA gives out travel funding for EA summits, but my take is that they should do so only in very rare cases. One-day conferences, at least in most places, should focus on people who live in the city they are held.