Meet the Outlier team: Jean

For many of Outlier's contributors, Jean Philippe Ausina Ruiz — by way of a message from his LinkedIn profile — is the first introduction to working on the platform.

Q: What do you do for Outlier?

Jean: I try to find as many people as possible to work on the platform. I spend most of my time on LinkedIn, reaching out to people who, based on certain signals from their profile, seem like they would be good fits to do Outlier work.

Q: What does that mean exactly — what signals?

Jean: Well, to put it simply, we need people who have specialized knowledge. Our experts create data that our customers use to train their generative AI models. That’s a mouthful; what it means, to oversimplify quite a lot, is that the people who work on Outlier are basically teaching these models what they know.

Q: What kinds of expertise is Outlier looking for right now?

Jean: The short answer is: all kinds! The more nuanced answer is that our needs at any particular moment are determined by the demands of our customers, and those can change over time. 

It’s safe to say we usually need coders, math experts, science experts, and people who speak all sorts of languages. If you take a look at our opportunities page, you’ll see that, at the moment, we also need people who specialize in accounting and taxes.

Q: Why do you need so many people?

Jean: Honestly, the demand from our customers is crazy. We can barely keep up. We just need more people to help us by creating data.

Q: What does it take to be successful on Outlier?

Jean: Well, first and foremost you actually have to know what you say you know — it’s self-reported, so if you claim to know chemistry but you don’t actually know much about it, you’re not going to make it very far.

Other than that, you need some free time — anything from an hour or two in the evening to a block of, you know, seven or eight hours on a Saturday. Also a computer, a wifi connection, basics like that.

Q: Let’s say someone wants to take you up on your offer to work on Outlier — what are the next steps?

Jean: There are a few things that our contributors have to do before they can start working on the Outlier.

1. Create an account

2. Verify their identity (this is a legal requirement)

3. Set up their payment info so they can get paid

4. Pass an assessment or two so that we can be sure they really do have the expertise that they claim to have

Q: OK, last question: What’s your dog’s name?

Jean: Akbal — it means “blue moon” in Mayan.