The tech consultancy stork brought baby AE Studio to Judd Rosenblatt. Today, we're a team of about 120 talented individuals - programmers, product designers, and data scientists - united by our mission to increase human agency.

AE Studio began its work in brain-computer interfaces (BCI) with the goal of accelerating the field and supporting open-source development. We didn't trust companies like Meta or Neuralink to control the extension of human thought, so we helped advance competitors, including backing Blackrock Neurotech, the developer of the first FDA-approved invasive BCI, while contributing to the open-source ecosystem through initiatives like our Neurotech Developers Toolkit. Later, we partnered with one of the first Focused Research Organizations, Forest Neurotech, which was co-founded by a former member of AE.

We continued our commitment to BCI innovation:

• Collaborations with top neurotech companies (Forest Neurotech, Blackrock Neurotech).
• Winner of the Neural Latent Benchmark Challenge, beating leading neuroscience labs globally.
• Developed widely-adopted open-source BCI tools (Neural Data Simulator, Neurotech Development Kit), privacy-preserving neural ML methods, and neuro metadata standards.
• Advocating increased government support and exploring BCI's future role in augmenting human intelligence alongside aligned AI.

As GPT-3, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4 were released in rapid succession, the trend lines appeared increasingly clear, our AI timelines shortened, and our concern for the future deepened. The odds shifted: it seemed unlikely that brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) would develop quickly enough to enhance human intelligence and help solve the Alignment problem as we had once hoped. With so few actively working on Alignment, we decided to throw our hat in the ring, aiming to help prevent human extinction at the hands of AI. At AE, we believe the space of plausible alignment research directions is vast and largely unexplored. Our "Neglected Approaches" approach focuses on pursuing a diverse set of promising but overlooked approaches to AI alignment.

Our alignment research team expanded over the past year as we brought on researchers we were deeply excited to work with. We initiated our work on self-other overlap and began exploring concerns around AI sentience. Alongside our technical research, we started publishing more thought pieces, aiming to push the field toward greater ambition, encouraging riskier, higher-impact approaches, such as engaging conservatives as serious partners in understanding the risks of AI. These bets paid off, helping us grow our influence in both the technical and policy arenas. Our initiatives also include promising collaborations with Princeton University professor Dr. Michael Graziano about his work on Attention Schema Theory, Redwood Research on AI control research, and EAIGG on forecasting AI development landscape, among many other endeavors.

We reinvest the profits from our consulting business into our Alignment R&D team. From the beginning, we've aspired to unite the two halves of our company, and our collaboration with Goodfire.ai marked a major milestone, offering the perfect opportunity to channel our industry expertise and operational speed into solving technical challenges in alignment. The results exceeded expectations. We are now expanding our work with AI alignment clients and deepening collaborations with a growing network of research organizations, including Redwood Research, PIBBSS, and individuals from Anthropic and Princeton University.

Our technical work continues across a wide front, from reverse-engineering prosociality and reducing LLM deception through self-other overlap, to a range of projects, collaborations, and client engagements, including work on the very question of AI consciousness. Our ambition knows no bounds, both technically and politically. We've engaged with members of the National Security Council, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, editors at leading academic journals, and congressional representatives and their staff. We genuinely believe it's possible to solve the Alignment problem and to help lead humanity toward a brilliant future. If this mission resonates with you, we'd love for you to join us in one way or another.