The New Side Hustle for Graduate Students: Training AI

Handshake, the college career network, has launched a networking service to connect students with top AI research labs. The aim is to create opportunities for “highly educated, highly skilled people” to monetize their expertise while helping companies validate models and assisting in advancing frontier knowledge.

“Handshake AI is the most ambitious chapter in the company’s history,” Garrett Lord, Handshake’s chief executive, says in a video announcement. “[It] connects PhDs and domain experts with leading AI labs. These experts test challenge and guide how AI models learn by providing the human judgment AI needs in order to evolve.”

There are more than 18 million users (students, alumni, and professionals) on Handshake’s platform. Three million of them hold graduate-level degrees, with more than 500,000 having PhDs. These are the students the company wants to pair with AI model makers. Through Handshake AI, graduate students will help train large language models using their academic expertise. They’ll also develop domain-specific prompts while also judging responses and output quality. Handshake will deal with all administrative work in-house, including sourcing and training, maintaining quality, and producing data on its annotation platform.

What this service offers AI labs is access to experts on-demand. Unlike using a service like Fiverr or Upwork, Handshake AI offers academic expertise that model makers are craving for. In the same video, Lord claims foundational model companies have been “banging down our door” to reach qualified students. They want those who are well-versed in unique domains such as mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, music, and education. Going through Handshake AI ensures these companies receive vetted individuals who have the research and studies to back up their CVs.

“Almost every one of our PhD students, they’re farther ahead than the model itself—they can break the model,” Lord boasts. “We sit at an amazing spot to help both deliver a better experience for our students…to help them make money where historically there’s this new era of gig work.”

This also creates opportunities for graduate students to get their foot in the door in the AI space while getting paid for making LLMs more intelligent with their domain expertise. This comes during a time when those in Gen-Z are finding it difficult to find work, especially after graduating. It’s unclear how much these graduate students are compensated for their services, and Handshake didn’t share what percentage its cut of the proceeds.

Companies looking to bringing in academic assistance can use Handshake’s expert finder. Experts and researchers can be filtered by their area of study, degree level (masters/doctorate), or by the degree path status (completed/in-progress). Results are initially sorted by university and the number of qualified students.

Started more than ten years ago by Lord and his co-founders Scott Ringwelski and Ben Christensen, Handshake serves as a resource for college students to assist them in their job or internship search. It connects students with a national network to show opportunities outside their city limits. According to Crunchbase, the company has raised $434 million in venture funding from Coatue, Valiant Peregrine Fund, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Spark Capital, Notable Capital, EQT Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, True Ventures, and others.

Featured Image: An AI-generated image showing a group of college graduate students. Credit: Adobe Firefly