Kabir Kumar's Shortform

Kabir Kumar

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So, apparently, I'm stupid. I could have been making money this whole time, but I was scared to ask for it

i've been giving a bunch of people and businesses advice on how to do their research and stuff. one of them messaged me, i was feeling tired and had so many other things to do. said my time is busy.

then thought fuck it, said if they're ok with a $15 an hour consulting fee, we can have a call. baffled, they said yes.

then realized, oh wait, i have multiple years of experience now leading dev teams, ai research teams, organizing research hackathons and getting frontier research done.

wtf

1Kabir Kumar1y

This was running AI Plans, my startup, so makes sense that I wasn't getting paid, since the same hesitancy for asking for money leads to hesitancy to do that exaggeration thing many AI Safety/EA people seem to do when making funding applications. Also, I don't like to make the funding applications, or long applications in general. [...] I think every time I've asked for money, I've tried to ask for the lowest amount I can. [...] I don't know - I have a doc of stuff I've done that I paste into LLMs when I need to make a funding applications and stuff - just pasted it into Gemini 2.5 Pro and asked what would be a reasonable hourly fee and it said $200 to $400 an hour. [...] I'll give it a go - I've currently put the asking price on my call link for $50 an hour, feel nervous about actually asking for that though. I need to make a funding application for AI Plans - I can ask for money on behalf of others on the team, but asking for money to be donated so I can get a high salary feels scary. Happy to ask for a high salary for others on the team though, since I want them to get paid what they need. [...] Yeah, I do. Generally, I'm used to doing a lot of free work for family and getting admonished when I ask for money. And when I did get promised money, it was either wayyy below market price or wayy late or didn't get paid at all. General experience with family was my work not being valued even when I put in extra effort. I'm aware that's wrong and has taught me wrong lessons, but not fully learnt the true ones yet.

I do think that $200-$400 seem like reasonable consulting rates.

I think the situations with family are complicated, because sure, there are social/cultural reasons one might be expected to do those things for family. Usually people hold those cultural norms alongside a stronger distinction between the ingroup (family) and the outgroup (all other people by default), though, so letting your impressions from that culture teach you things about how to behave in a culture with a weaker distinction might be maladaptive.

(I actually was suggesting you try asking f... (read more)

1Kabir Kumar2y

Update - consulting went well. He said he was happy with it and got a lot of useful stuff. I was upfront with the fact that I just made up the $15 an hour and might change it, asked him what he'd be happy with, he said it's up to me, but didn't seem bothered at all at the price potentially changing. I was upfront about the stuff I didn't know and was kinda surprised at how much I was able to contribute, even knowing that I underestimate my technical knowledge because I barely know how to code.