EA program and donor links in AI employment

The Holoscope census contains 1,929 people with 1,997 recorded AI-company employment relationships across 107 companies. Public program and grant checks identify 80 people with a program or personal funding record, 4.1% of the census. For 1,849 people, the checked sources contain no such record.

The review attributes 1 hiring decision to a named decision-maker. It separately documents 9 workplace supervision pairs and retains 11 supervision or recruitment pairs in a broader comparison. These relationships describe a small, purposively selected subset of the database. Counted pairs cover 11 distinct employees, 0.6% of the census. Hiring preferences across AI companies remain unresolved.

The classification records listed participant or mentor roles in selected EA-funded programs, or a personal grant recommendation, award or donation documented in the checked sources. A missing record leaves the person’s beliefs and other affiliations unknown. Program participants and mentors appear separately in the evidence ledger. Employer funding remains an institutional relationship.

The baseline contains 75 people with a recorded marker. Additional source checks raise that total to 80. The measured share depends on which programs publish searchable directories, which people use matching public names, and which employment records Holoscope collected. Its records combine historical and current employment. Some mentor listings are undated. A website’s current navigation may advertise a future program without dating the listed mentor’s role.

Hiring attribution

The strict count requires a source that identifies the person who recruited or hired the employee. Recorded-marker classifications use the checked career histories; a missing record remains unresolved at the hiring date. Team supervision supplies a weaker connection: a manager may have inherited a team member, and a program affiliation may have begun after the hire. The strict hiring table contains 1 qualifying pair.

Ray Kurzweil identifies Larry Page as the person who recruited them to Google in 2012. Exclusive Interview: Ray Kurzweil Discusses His First Two Months At Google.

The requested EA/non-EA split can be calculated only as a split between people with a recorded marker and people with no record in the checked sources. Each percentage below is a composition of the selected pair sample. A hiring-rate comparison would require the qualified applicant pool, selection outcomes and the decision-maker’s role for each hiring event.

Supervision and recruitment records

The broader comparison retains 11 documented supervision or recruitment pairs. The four cells are 1 record/record, 2 record/no-record, 1 no-record/record and 7 no-record/no-record, with supervisor or recruiter listed first. The evidence uses recorded lifetime affiliations where hiring-date classifications remain unresolved. Publicly visible researchers, team leaders and MATS-linked biographies supplied several of the leads; this selection concentrates the comparison around people with discoverable professional records.

Union of directly attributed hiring, primary-source workplace supervision and explicit recruitment involvement. Each sourced pair retained once. Secondary-source reported supervision appears in a separate sensitivity.

Among pairs whose supervisor or recruiter has a record, 33.3% of employees have a record and 66.7% have no record. Among pairs whose supervisor or recruiter has no record, the corresponding shares are 12.5% and 87.5%. Looking in the reverse direction, 50.0% of employees with a record have a supervisor or recruiter with a record; for employees with no record, that share is 22.2%. The tables retain every denominator, including undefined percentages where a group contains zero pairs.

Coverage and unresolved records

The corpus search checks database records for all 1,929 people. For 81 people, it also reaches captured source text; the remaining 1,848 have database-only coverage in that audit. The review separately checks named relationship leads against public sources. A complete individual web search remains unrecorded for most employees. Primary-source supervision or recruitment remains unresolved for 1,918 people. The secondary-source sensitivity adds company reporting about Holden Karnofsky, Jan Leike; it leaves 1,916 people without a qualifying relationship in that broader sample.

The census follows the repository’s company classification and source-bearing employment records. It includes founder, intern and historical employment roles where a source supports the relationship. One person can contribute relationships at several companies. Counts by company therefore overlap.

Every employee row retains source links and a supervision-review status. A source can establish employment while leaving the employee’s team and hiring decision-maker unresolved. Project coauthorship and external program mentorship remain separate from company line management. The pair ledger preserves those distinctions.

The grant review cross-checks personal records against public registers. A donor’s grant to a company, program or research institution supplies context for that institution. Each employee’s personal-funding marker requires a separately documented personal grant recommendation, award or donation. Ambiguous name matches remain excluded from the personal-funding marker. The additional named-research sensitivity includes 4 people explicitly named in grants to institutions, bringing the census marker count to 84.