Help us scale up good reasoning. We’re a small team dedicated to building a world where everyone has access to better reasoning tools.
Good reasoning is essential, but rare
The key to radically scaling up good reasoning lies in advanced AI systems, which will have the capacity to do human-like reasoning at superhuman quality and quantity.
For high-stakes situations, it’s especially important that the reasoning is correct, and that the systems we’re deploying don’t themselves introduce further risks.
We build tools to improve reasoning
Over time, we want Elicit to become a general-purpose tool for research and reasoning that can provide the most reliable answers for the world’s most important questions.
We’re building process-based systems that prove that it’s possible to build AI tools that handle important knowledge and decision-making tasks in ways that are systematic, transparent, and unbounded.
Why you’ll love working here
Work on a product researchers love
You’ll get to see things you worked on used by hundreds of thousands of people every month, as you help create a product our users can’t live without.
Improve scientific research
We are solving impactful problems for researchers, using the latest technology, with a super-smart team.
Remote or hybrid — work how (and where) you work best
We have an office in Oakland, CA, as well as team members spread across North America and Europe. We don’t micromanage your work, and strive to create an environment where you can do the best work of your career.
Contribute to safe AI
Work with people who care about AI going well. You’ll build on the work our team has already done on factored cognition and task decomposition.
Small, talent-dense team
Our team is agile and low on bureaucracy. You’ll get to contribute efficiently and take responsibility over a large part of the company.
Benefits and perks
We believe taking care of our team leads to better outcomes for our users and the company, too. We cover the basics (health, vision, dental, 401(k) with matching, parental leave), plus extras meant to help improve your work and life.
Read more reasons to work with us in this Twitter thread.
Why you might not love working here
- While we’ve raised a $9 million seed round and are growing in revenue every month, we’re still a very early stage startup exploring our product market fit. That means projects and priorities will shift frequently. If you’re a person who loves a lot of clearly defined structure and certainty, this might not be the right time for you to join Elicit (yet).
- We’re a small team who loves to learn but if you need close mentorship, you might not find it here. We will support your growth, but at our stage, we need people who are excited to lead and direct their own learning, and who feel great about making impactful decisions daily.
- If having lots of direct reports is meaningful to you, you might not feel fulfilled at Elicit right away. We’re growing our team (sometimes painfully) slowly, which means we don’t expect new management layers to form any time soon. We embrace leadership and opportunities to teach your teammates what you know, but if your career goals include directly managing other humans, you should know your role might not move in that direction at Elicit.
- We are looking for people who excel in their wheelhouse, but who will also engage with and offer their perspective across different parts of the company. If you prefer to focus on your own lane, we’re probably not quite ready for you yet. We are building Elicit together, as a team, and need people who are comfortable dissenting and raising flags when we could do something better.
Our values
Above all, we care about having a positive impact on the world.
As a company, we:
- Work to steer AI towards positive impact by scaling up good reasoning.
- Chose to be a Public Benefit Corporation to declare to the world that we choose impact over short-term profit.
- Focus on building a product that actually improves people’s reasoning and research quality. We aim to hold higher standards for accuracy than our users do or ask for.
As individuals, we:
- Each care deeply about our own personal impact on the world. We all strive to leave the world better than it was, in our own personal way.
- Fully trust one another with large parts of the business and our work. When you know everybody else is accountable for their positive impact and ethical standards, it feels good to share the responsibility.
We want to have a deeply transformative impact, big bold steps forward at a time.
As a company, we:
- Don’t shy away from large, dramatic changes to the product.
- Focus on building a product that actually improves people’s reasoning and research quality. We aim to hold higher standards for accuracy than our users do or ask for.
As individuals, we:
- Build a habit of taking action. We operate with high agency, with a default of always moving forward.
- Set goals for ourselves that sometimes scare us! (And help each other reach them.)
We care about understanding the truth and becoming less wrong ourselves.
As a company, we:
- Don’t chase hype. We care more about deep fundamental value and truths that will persist.
- Focus on evaluating different features of Elicit, working with users to get high-quality examples of correct answers.
- Respect the limitations of current language models, and don’t have them automate large chunks of work. We prioritize making it very easy to check Elicit’s work by showing steps and quotes from the process it took to arrive at an answer.
As individuals, we:
- Love to “yes, and” each other to get to the best possible version of every idea.
- Write a lot! We like direct, straightforward writing and communication, with clear logical structure so people can follow along with your thinking.Set goals for ourselves that sometimes scare us! (And help each other reach them.)
We’re trying to build an outlier company with outlier results. This requires outlier levels of excellence.
As a company, we:
- Care more about hiring the right people than filling roles so we can execute more quickly.
- Are particular about how we choose to express our excellence. At our current stage, we express our excellence with how effectively we can ship bold, product-changing features for our users.
As individuals, we:
- Celebrate craftsmanship as a distinctly Elician trait. Individually, we all love what we do beyond the company’s mission and individual role.
We’re human people trying to do a superhuman thing.
As a company, we:
- Remember that we’re building for humans. We try hard to respond to every single user from the perspective that they’re also a real human trying to get an important thing done, even if they’re frustrated with us.
- Don’t blindly optimize for metrics. We try to understand what really matters to people.
As individuals, we:
- Embrace “unserious seriousness.” We take our work and impact seriously, while still having a grounded sense of humor about it.
- Support each others’ success by seeking and sharing thoughtful feedback. Maintaining a high bar for excellence works better when we’re building each other up toward it.
- Take naps when we need to take naps! As humans, we know that rest is a requirement.
Who you’ll work with
Our team has backgrounds and interests spanning research, academia, startups, engineering, and tools for thought. When we aren’t saving the world from AI catastrophe and the slow demise of the modern concept of truth, we are making music, gardening, baking elaborately layered desserts that take multiple days to complete, “vlogging” (sort of), and spending time with our cats.
We’re backed by an outstanding group of investors, including deep tech seed fund Fifty Years, with participation from Basis Set, Illusian, Mythos, Julian Capital, and angel investors with expertise in AI & AI alignment, startups, and research, including Tom Preston-Werner, co-founder of Github, Arash Ferdowsi, co-founder of Dropbox, Thomas Ebeling, former CEO of Novartis, and Jeff Dean, Chief Scientist at Google.
