Organizations and individuals generate an immense amount of data. How we decide to utilize and protect that data shapes the future of technology and society.
Techniques like machine learning and AI have revolutionized how we think about healthcare, medicine, transportation, financial services, and which television show we plan to binge this weekend.
We believe in making data maximally useful to benefit society and increase human agency.
We believe that privacy should be central to that consideration. Technology designed to empower users, corrupted by the wrong financial incentives, can ultimately diminish their agency. At AE, we are focused on researching and developing best privacy practices for unlocking the potential of your private data on your terms.
We are researching, building, and testing privacy-enhancing techniques to protect sensitive user data. We are creating and implementing the tools needed to use that data responsibly.
At AE, we believe that when it comes to data, you should be able to have your cake and eat it too. We believe that sensitive and private data should remain private – full stop. We also believe that even with that constraint, users should also be able to benefit from technologies and tools that increase human agency.
For example, medical devices can record signals from the body that provide unique insight into states of disease, dysfunction, or unlock new functionality. But building tools using machine learning should not require closing your eyes and clicking “Accept all” to 100 pages of inscrutable terms and conditions.
We maintain independence. AE exists without funding from outside shareholders, venture capital, and private equity (Google’s founders never wanted ads, but their investors did). AE is already a fully-bootstrapped business that has grown from 0 to ~150 with agency-increasing BCI as its ambitious Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal.
We are a group of experts in machine learning, neuroscience, software development, and user-focused design. We develop technology that increases human agency, rather than harvesting user data as a product.
We are growing a profitable, longtermist software company, training the best developers, designers, and engineers on the planet (or any other), building agency-increasing products for those clients and ourselves, and investing in altruistic, agency-increasing BCI initiatives. We fund internal skunkworks projects that increase human agency and can become viable businesses themselves.
We follow our core values of increasing human agency, rather than pursuing short-term financial incentives. We take acceleratingly large A/B testing baby steps, realizing that we are only 1% of what we could be.
AE Studio is a studio based in Los Angeles, CA.
