Did I rejoin Ambitious Impact at the wrong time?

Published on October 15, 2026 1:22 PM GMT TL;DR: No, but you might, if you leave it too late: We’re hiring for seven roles, and the people who join now will shape what a much bigger AIM becomes. The first step is cheap -- an expression of interest form. My worry I rejoined[1] AIM in February. The team/culture and growth plans are more exciting to me than ever, but when I look at trends outside of AIM, in particular in AI capabilities, I’d be lying if I hadn’t asked myself if I came back at the wrong time.. The worry goes something like this: A new charity takes about five years to reach its peak scale, and some kinds of benefits (e.g. from education, or some policy changes) can take a decade to materialize[2]. If AI transforms the world before then[3], the majority of the new charity’s impact will go unrealized. So is starting new charities the best thing you can be doing with your career right now? I grappled with this myself for months. I tried to put aside the sunk cost fallacy and consider whether I should be doing something else. My answer is that there's nowhere else I'd rather be right now. I hope you’ll come join me. This post will explain why. Broad timelines imply a portfolio of bets, and AIM is an important bet within it No one knows with certainty when (or whether) AI will transform the world. Maybe the business side fails: the AI industry is super leveraged, so if it doesn’t sustain an unprecedented growth rate and if new investors aren’t convinced, the house of cards could collapse. Maybe public pressure and political intervention slows progress (which could in turn bring the financial house of cards down). Maybe AI will only gain the capabilities to transform the economy by learning from real-world experience, which requires diffusion that could take many years. Maybe unknown-unknowns.. So instead of thinking in terms of short or long timelines, we should think in terms of broad timelines – a probability distribution. Even if your modal timeline is short, you should want the world to be making a portfolio of bets that maximise impact in expectation across that probability distribution. That includes bets that pay off most on longer timelines. Your own career is one bet in that portfolio, and you should consider your comparative advantage when you make it. To choose an obvious example, if you have a track record scaling health programs in low-income countries (unusually rare and valuable experience) maybe don’t pivot to AI safety? But less dominating advantages, like having spent years steeped in a given cause (through work, study or volunteering) should factor into your bet too[4]. And experience isn’t the only kind of comparative advantage: plenty of roles, like marketing and comms (IMO), are more a matter of aptitude than experience. [I recognize there are plenty who won’t find this persuasive, because they think the probability distribution is such that basically everyone should be doing short-timelines work. This post isn’t for you (but check out a comment I’ve left, which specifically IS for you). This post is for people whose timelines are consistent with people doing work that has impact over more than just a few years, and who have been waiting for someone to tell them it’s okay to be the ones doing that work. It IS okay! 🌈] AIM is an important bet to have in our portfolio. I’m sure you’re sick of hearing about it by now, but a bunch of increased funding is already committed to highly impactful charities, with even more expected. We have a great opportunity and responsibility to deploy it as effectively as possible. If we get this right, we could make unprecedented progress on the world’s biggest problems, even eradicating some of them like humanity did with smallpox. But there are limits to how many programs existing organizations can run, and how far they can scale the ones they have. So we need a pipeline of ambitious new organizations to fill the gap. Building that pipeline is what AIM does, and we've gotten pretty good at it (although we still have a lot more room for improvement). We've been refining our approach since 2018, having launched 69 charities, with 13 of the 16 that are old enough and in scope having been funded by GiveWell, 10 receiving funding from Animal Charity Evaluators, and several becoming pioneers in their fields, like LEEP in lead exposure and Shrimp Welfare Project in shrimp welfare. Joining now means helping shape what AIM becomes. Our plans are more ambitious than ever: We want to launch more charities, and better ones. Much like venture capital, charity incubation is hits-based: most of our charities are great, but a small number become field leaders so impactful that they account for the majority of our impact. To scale our impact, we want more of those field leaders. The plan: First, we’ll increase the chance that any given charity becomes one, through initiatives to improve the quality of our incubation (getting more ambitious charities up and r