Career Transition Fellowships on Digital Sentience
Longview Philanthropy, Macroscopic Ventures, and The Navigation Fund invite applications for funding to transition to a career working on the potential consciousness, sentience, moral status, or welfare of artificial intelligence systems. Fellows will receive a living stipend, access to networking opportunities, and possible assistance in access to computational resources.
Example Profiles
Some examples of the types of candidates who we could be excited about include the following:
- A current or planned PhD or other degree student seeking financial support to study digital sentience
- An AI researcher who would like to explore research topics in digital sentience in order to select a high-impact role
- A communications professional interested in pivoting to digital sentience work by running surveys
- A nonprofit entrepreneur who plans to spend a year exploring digital sentience and identifying an organisation that would be useful to start up
- A career civil servant, diplomat, or policy researcher seeking to explore what could be done to secure policies that deal with potential digital minds sensibly
Structure
In general, the fellowship will involve the following:
- A stipend to be determined by the length of time, cost of living, and fellow’s prior experience
- Invitation to an annual Mind, Ethics, and Policy Summit hosted by the Center for Mind, Ethics, and Policy at NYU
- Access to computational resources for those conducting compute-intensive machine learning research
Applicants will have the opportunity to request additional resources to be provided at donors’ discretion.
Requirements and selection criteria
Applications will be selected primarily on the basis of the following criteria:
- Interest in digital sentience and related issues. Ideal applicants would be able to demonstrate an understanding of the interactions between digital sentience and AI-related existential risk, and would be committed to high-impact work of plausible practical relevance
- Evidence of potential for impact, as demonstrated by prior achievements, employment record, academic achievement, and references
- Planned fellowship activities and potential future work activities
Applications must be compliant with all relevant local laws, and applicants must be located in countries where Longview is able to make grants, as listed in the application form.
To apply, please fill out the application here. The application requires the following:
- Basic biographical information and logistics questions
- Resume, CV, or LinkedIn page that includes prior employment, educational background, and key achievements
- Discussion of what motivates you to want to work on this topic (around two paragraphs)
- Description of how you will spend your time during the fellowship (around two to five paragraphs)
- What would you do if you did not get this funding (e.g., get funding elsewhere—please specify best guess of source and likelihood, work on something else—please specify what/one to two paragraphs)
- Discussion of what you might do after the fellowship (around two to five paragraphs)
- Funding requested, timeline, and what you would do if you did not get funding
For questions about the application, please email Zach Freitas-Groff. The application deadline is July 9, 2025.