How MIT PhD candidate Daniel Z. earns extra income on Outlier

Daniel Z. has no shortage of intellectual pursuits. As a PhD student at MIT, he devotes much of his time to molecular biology and electrical engineering. However, artificial intelligence has always piqued his interest.

“AI has already changed the way that we go about our day-to-day lives in so many ways for the better,” he says. 

A few months ago, he came across an opportunity to work on Outlier, and the combination of earning extra cash while contributing to AI development was too good to pass up. Daniel has now logged more than 100 hours on Outlier, and a few particular topics continue to fuel his passion.

“My favorites have been in the multi-modal series,” he says. “These are fun because they involve images. You use images and helper prompts to get the model to generate a response, then determine whether there were any reasoning errors along the way.”

Even the more straightforward projects provide Daniel with a valuable glimpse at how these models work. 

“I've also enjoyed the single turn series,” he says. “These are relatively straightforward tasks where you generate a prompt, let the model choose between some user input responses, and grade them based on mathematical accuracy, conciseness, presentation, and so on.”

Daniel would highly recommend Outlier to his friends. The platform offers great flexibility, so you can work no matter how irregular your schedule may be. Additionally, he’s been impressed by Outlier’s support network and inviting community. 

“The community there is great and always available to answer any questions that you might have. There are a ton of great things I’ve discovered on the platform, not to mention the experience of participating in the improvement of these new large language models.” 

It doesn’t hurt that Daniel feels his expertise is appreciated and valued.

“I’ve made about $4,000 working for Outlier,” he says with a grin, “so not too bad.”