AE Studio Research
About
Updated 04/03/26AE Studio Research is the formal research division and grants program of AE Studio, a profitable, bootstrapped technology consultancy headquartered in Marina Del Rey (Venice), California, founded in 2016. AE Studio's business model — a ~150-person software, data science, and design agency with 21 PhDs on staff — funds its research activities without external investors or venture capital, insulating the research agenda from commercial pressures. The alignment research division was launched around 2022, following the rapid release of GPT-3, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4, which compressed AE Studio's AI timelines and led them to conclude that brain-computer interface development alone would be insufficient to address alignment risks before transformative AI arrived. The team pivoted from a BCI-first theory of change to a broader 'neglected approaches' alignment agenda. The research agenda identifies ten or more underinvestigated directions, including: reverse-engineering prosociality from neuroscience to inform AI behavior design; self-other overlap mechanisms; attention schema theory (in collaboration with Princeton's Dr. Michael Graziano); empirical AI consciousness research; reinforcement learning from neural feedback (RLNF); provably safe AI architectures; BCI-driven human value mapping; and policy interventions such as AI whistleblower protections and growing government funding for safety research. The team also continues to maintain open-source BCI tools including the Neural Data Simulator and the Neurotech Development Kit. The named alignment research team numbers approximately 11 researchers, with backgrounds spanning neuroscience, physics, cognitive science, and machine learning. Key personnel include Judd Rosenblatt (CEO/Founder), Diogo de Lucena (Chief Scientist), Mike Vaiana (R&D Director), and Keenan Pepper (physicist, formerly worked on LIGO algorithms). The team has published at NeurIPS (winning a best paper award in 2022 for 'Ignore Previous Prompt'), presented at the Science of Consciousness conference, hosted SXSW panels, and published alignment research on LessWrong and the EA Forum. External collaborations include Redwood Research, Goodfire.ai, PIBBSS, and individual researchers from Anthropic. The research.ae.studio subdomain functions as a portal for researchers and innovators to submit proposals for resources, support, and open-source software from AE Studio. Note: 'AE Studio Research' as an entry in this database likely represents the same legal entity as the main 'AE Studio' entry — it is a program and brand of AE Studio rather than a separate organization.
Theory of Change
AE Studio Research believes that the alignment problem is solvable but critically under-resourced, and that the most impactful work lies in directions the mainstream research community has overlooked. By deploying profits from a profitable consulting business into an independent research team, they avoid the incentive structures that push other organizations toward capabilities work. Their research aims to diversify the alignment solution space — drawing on neuroscience insights about prosociality, consciousness, and human values — and to build a 'Bell Labs-style research engine' that combines technical R&D with policy engagement. The causal chain is: profitable consulting funds independent research, research generates novel alignment insights in neglected areas, insights are published and shared to shift the broader ecosystem, and policy engagement translates research into durable government-level safety commitments.
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