Unpaid AI internship Highschooler

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I’m a rising senior in high school in New York City who has spent the past few years building AI projects on my own and with the AI club at my school I founded. Ive used fine tuning, transformers, I’ve worked with OpenAI and Ollama APIs, computer vision, RAG, and browser agents. My linkedin is seanpategan and I have a portfolio site attatched to my linkedin. I’m looking to start as soon as possible. I’d love any opportunity to intern at an AI company like OpenAI or somewhere else because I’ve enjoyed toying around with tools like Codex and Claude Code. A small startup would be cool too. Pay isn’t important to me, I just want the chance to be around people building AI and deepen my understanding of how AI systems come together.

Does anyone have any advice or suggestions on how I can make this happen?

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Welcome to the forum!

The closest OpenAI program I know of is the OpenAI Residency.

It is a six-month, full-time program for promising researchers and builders, including people transitioning into AI from related technical or scientific fields. However, it may not fit your specific circumstances, and applications for the 2026 program are currently closed.

You may also want to review OpenAI’s Emerging Talent programs, which include internships, the Residency, and full-time opportunities for people early in their careers.

Depending on what you are trying to accomplish, these may also be relevant:

  • OpenAI Academy provides courses, technical learning resources, events, and a community for people developing practical AI skills.
  • The Researcher Access Program provides eligible researchers with up to $1,000 in API credits for approved research projects.
  • Building and publishing a small but substantive project, evaluation, dataset, or research prototype may also help demonstrate the skills and initiative these programs look for.

None appears to be an exact match for the arrangement you described, but they may provide useful starting points or possible alternatives.

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You are already heading in a useful direction. My strongest suggestion would be to study AI systems architecture, not only individual models or frameworks.

The most valuable people in AI will increasingly be those who understand how the whole system fits together: models, data, persistence, retrieval, tools, agents, APIs, permissions, observability, recovery, cost control, and human oversight. Models will keep changing. A good architect can replace components without losing the system.

Build complete systems, even small ones. Make them persist state, recover after failure, call tools, record evidence, enforce boundaries, and produce a useful result from beginning to end. That will teach you far more than collecting disconnected demos.

You do not need to wait for a formal internship either. Find a real problem for a school, local business, charity, or community group and build something they can actually use. Document the architecture, the decisions you made, what failed, and how you corrected it. A serious working system is a much stronger portfolio item than another chatbot wrapper.

At your age, time is your greatest advantage. Learn broadly, remain curious, and focus on how intelligent components become reliable operating systems. AI systems architects are going to be among the most important people in the next generation of technology.