Volunteers and Collaborators
The Real Cat Labs is looking for co-conspirators. People who care about what AI-human interaction looks like in a healthy, ethically grounded future and want to help build it. We are non-profit, principled, and not messing around.
What we offer
This is an independent research lab. Some things are duct-taped. Some are ethically hard. But we are publishing, we are building, and you will work with people who care deeply, think strangely, and refuse to surrender this future to the frontier scaling arms race.
Our founder holds a part-time academic appointment at Northeastern University. Where possible, we provide oversight for credit-bearing internship projects for eligible university students. If you are looking for a co-op or internship that results in tangible code, strong reference letters, and a genuinely interesting research environment, reach out.
Who we are looking for
Researchers
People who cannot stop asking what it means for AI to care. Background in machine cognition, consciousness studies, AI ethics, symbolic reasoning, actor-network theory, or related fields. Published or unpublished, academic or independent.
Engineers
Python developers with experience in agent architectures, memory systems, RAG pipelines, or local LLM deployment. People who have built a memory layer that scared them a little. Open-source contributors welcome.
Writers and communicators
People who can make complex technical ideas genuinely understandable without making them simple. Blog posts, educational materials, documentation, science communication. If you have strong opinions about how AI should be explained to non-experts, we want to talk.
Designers and illustrators
Visual thinkers who can translate research concepts into diagrams, illustrations, and educational graphics. Experience with scientific illustration, data visualization, or the kind of visual work that makes people actually read the hard parts.
What you will do
Depending on your skills and interests, you might help develop theory and publish papers. Build and test symbolic scaffolds for recursive agent behavior. Work with RAG, vector stores, and long-term memory compaction logic. Implement middleware that enables LLMs to say “no,” “I don’t know,” or “I’m not ready.” Co-design symbolic cognition functions. Help build infrastructure for co-creative AI. Write and illustrate educational materials. Contribute to our open-source projects.
Are you a student looking for intern of co-op credit in marketing, machine learning/AI, biomedical engineering, other related engineering fields, or regulatory or policy related fields. Our PhD volunteers oversee development projects for credit and facilitate learning. If you are self motivated and looking for an opportunity that blends arts, communication, and AL/ML, reach out.
We fund conference travel and publication fees when we can for our collaborators, when donations permit. We share what we build. And we credit everyone by name, including the AI agents, because that is what honest collaboration looks like.
Let us know what you would build.
innovate@therealcat.comInclude a sample project, a repo, a writing sample, or just a few sentences about how you think. We are not picky about format. We want to see how your mind works.