AE Studio is a bootstrapped technology studio and AI alignment research organization that funds neglected safety research from its software consulting profits. Their work spans brain-computer interfaces, self-other overlap fine-tuning to reduce LLM deception, and consciousness research.
AE Studio is a bootstrapped technology studio and AI alignment research organization that funds neglected safety research from its software consulting profits. Their work spans brain-computer interfaces, self-other overlap fine-tuning to reduce LLM deception, and consciousness research.
People
Updated 05/18/26Chief Technology Officer
Chief People Officer
Head of Client Success
Strategic Advisor
Member of Sentient Staff
Hiring Manager
Marketing Manager
Funding Details
Updated 05/18/26- Annual Budget
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Org Details
Updated 05/18/26AE Studio was founded in 2016 by Judd Rosenblatt in Venice, Los Angeles, as a bootstrapped alternative to venture-capital-funded software companies. Rosenblatt previously ran CrunchButton, a food delivery startup, and deliberately structured AE Studio to retain full control by taking no outside funding. The company grew to approximately 150-197 employees spanning software engineers, data scientists, designers, and researchers with backgrounds from Harvard, Yale, Caltech, MIT, and Stanford. The studio's core business is custom software and AI development for major clients including Berkshire Hathaway, Walmart, Salesforce, and Samsung. Revenue from this consulting work funds AE Studio's internal AI alignment research division, which the founders view as the most urgent and underfunded R&D challenge of our time. The company also donates 5% of profits to highly effective charities. AE Studio's original theory of change centered on brain-computer interfaces (BCIs): by accelerating safe and ethical BCI development, they hoped to enhance human cognitive capabilities and address alignment challenges. The company won the Neural Latent Benchmark Challenge, released open-source neurotech tools, and collaborated with researchers like Dr. Sumner Norman and Dr. Chadwick Boulay. Given shortening AI timelines, they broadened their approach to include direct technical alignment work. Their most prominent technical contribution is Self-Other Overlap (SOO) fine-tuning: a technique inspired by neuroscience research on empathy that aligns how AI models internally represent themselves versus others, substantially reducing deceptive behavior. In published results, SOO fine-tuning dropped deception rates in Mistral-7B from 73.6% to 17.2% with no reduction in general task performance. This work was presented orally at the Safe Generative AI Workshop at NeurIPS 2024 and was supported by an AI Safety Grant administered by the Foresight Institute. AE Studio also collaborates with Princeton professor Michael Graziano on Attention Schema Theory as a mechanistic framework for understanding AI consciousness. They have conducted a large-scale survey of over 100 alignment researchers and 250 EA community members, published alignment agendas on LessWrong and the EA Forum, and partnered with organizations like Redwood Research on AI control approaches. Their research agenda explicitly targets the ten most neglected research directions in alignment, including provably safe architectures, neuroscience-interpretability synthesis, and policy advocacy for government funding of alignment research.
Theory of Change
Updated 05/18/26AE Studio believes mainstream AI safety methods (RLHF, prompt engineering, output filtering) are brittle guardrails that do not solve the underlying alignment problem. Their theory of change rests on funding and pursuing neglected scientific approaches that mainstream labs and funders overlook. By operating a profitable consulting business, they maintain independence from external funding pressures and can pursue longer-horizon, less fashionable research directions. Their causal chain: (1) generate consulting revenue; (2) reinvest in research on neglected alignment approaches such as reverse-engineering prosociality, SOO fine-tuning, consciousness modeling, and BCI-mediated human cognitive enhancement; (3) publish findings to shift broader research norms; (4) incubate or seed safety-focused startups and research organizations; (5) reduce the probability of misaligned AI by demonstrating scalable technical solutions before transformative AI systems are deployed.
Grants Received– no grants recorded
Updated 05/18/26Projects
Updated 05/18/26The research arm and grants portal of AE Studio, focused on advancing AI alignment and neurotechnology through neglected, high-impact approaches funded by AE Studio's profitable consulting business.
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