[tworats]

I've had great luck with graduate students (and sometimes even ungrads): I'll find a grad student who knows the topic, often by searching for lesser known content creators on youtube/blogs, and reach out with an offer to pay for their time to explain a particular topic. So far it's worked out great, and I've created relationships with smart up and coming people in the field - they make meaningful money, I accelerate my learning. I ended up eventually hiring one, and another did consulting for me for some time. We had a routine where I'd ask them to read and summarize / teach me ML papers that were of interest to me, which they in turn could use in their studies/thesis/youtube channels.

Tips on this: content creators tend to be more open to and better at explaining things, and you get to see their ability to explain before you pay them. If you can, overpay them - students need the money more than you do :-)

[mamonster]

This is very good advice. It works even better if the concept you are looking for is on the MS level rather than PhD candidate level because its pretty easy to beat T.A wages in most jurisdictions.

This is also a great way to do interviews if you have a small number of candidates: Just make them explain a final year BS / first year MS topic from the beginning without handwaving.

[oefrha]

I wonder how you word your cold emails so that people bother to respond. Do you offer an hourly rate upfront in the first email? Thing is as someone who’s quite frequently on the receiving end of cold emails, I respond to companies looking for contracting/consulting because I know they probably have an at least passable rate in mind, whereas the few times I responded to individuals offering to pay for mentoring or feature development in my open source projects, after a few back and forth I realized they expected to pay one to two orders of magnitudes less than what I normally charge (e.g. $50 for about a week’s work, true story), it’s frankly embarrassing, so now I no longer respond to this sort of individual requests.

[tomcam]

I like it! Where did you find the grad students? Or more specifically, how did you find them?

[tworats]

Two had small youtube channels delving into details of ML papers, one had a blog with a good explanation of a specific detail on a paper I was interested, one was a recommendation by my graduate advisor (I keep in touch with the university I graduated from a thousand years ago). The undergrad had a fantastic comment on a thread somewhere, I think in Kaggle.