Greg Buckner is co-founder and chief operating officer of AE Studio, an AI development, implementation and consulting firm in Los Angeles, California, where he helps lead the strategy, partnerships and operations behind its AI alignment work. He worked at the software consultancy Carbon Five and at Intuit before AE, and was its chief technology officer as the studio grew from five people to more than 50.
One Dinner with Judd Rosenblatt
He met his business partner Judd Rosenblatt over a single meal, where they talked about technology that manipulates people or ignores how the brain works, and about building products aligned with the goals of the people who use them. AE already existed as an agency, kept running after Rosenblatt and his partner Ed’s food delivery startup failed so the staff could stay on. Buckner joined as a partner. “We kind of saw it as a re-founding at that time,” he told The Startup Stack podcast in 2021.
Extreme Programming and Steelmanning
He brought with him the extreme programming practices he had learned at a software consultancy and adapted them into AE’s own version of agile. He runs the business on the Entrepreneurial Operating System from Gino Wickman’s book Traction and argues for small, reversible steps that compound like interest. He also pushes the team to steelman, strengthening the other side of an argument before deciding. “You can literally imagine a scarecrow and then imagine it being sheathed in armor and it being the best version of itself,” he said. AE’s team page says he is most interested in the incentives and business models that could make AI safety scalable and economically durable (AE Studio).