I’m often asked where I find the people to feature in the Lunchbreak column, and the truth is that most come by way of recommendation. A reader told me I would appreciate speaking to Judd Rosenblatt, founder of AE Studio, a company focused on software development using AI as a main function of any software.
He said I would find Judd interesting. That was an understatement.
After spending five years running a successful food delivery startup, Judd decided to get involved in the world of AI—not to cash in, but to make sure, as he says, “that it doesn’t kill all of humanity.”
It turns out that Judd is one of the foremost leaders in the field of AI, particularly in trying to ensure that its future remains safe for everyone. He is one of those pioneers who isn’t motivated by money; rather, he’s looking to make a change in the world.
Leaders of government (including the current administration—they called him this week) and founders of other AI companies consult with him regularly.
At the same time, he has built a massively successful company in his own right. AE Studio has worked with and developed custom software for companies such as Berkshire Hathaway, Walmart, Salesforce, Samsung and more.
Additionally, AE Studio has created several of its own startups as well. We spoke about his business, how AI will affect us all and some practical tips. Enjoy!
—Nesanel
I was born in the Netherlands. My father, who’s from Los Angeles, was working there at the time. I think he thought that work would be less demanding there than in the US, but it turned out that the opposite was true. So when I was about two, we moved to New York, where my mother is from. That’s where I grew up, first in Manhattan then in Westchester, in the same small town where my mother grew up. I went to the local public school; she was the president of our school board, just as her mother used to be.
“My family has a long history of caring a great deal about Judaism and Israel. My great-great-grandfather, Jacob May, came over from Germany and started the May Hosiery Mill in Nashville, which eventually became the largest employer in the city. Then his son, my great-grandfather, sponsored Jews by saying he’d give them a job in the sock factory, and he was able to save hundreds of Jews from the Holocaust. His brother, Mortimer May, grew up as a Reform Jew in Nashville, and then he returned to Germany and stayed with his grandfather, who was Orthodox, and saw firsthand how Judaism enriches your life. He went back to Germany many times with his son, Leon, and noticed the increase in Jewish persecution. That inspired him to be involved and influential in the early creation of the State of Israel. Sam Shankman wrote about him in the book, Mortimer May: Footsoldier in Zion. That book was very important for me. It inspired me to connect more deeply to my own Jewish heritage.
“I was always an entrepreneurial kid. I realized that my friends had a lot of money from their bar mitzvahs, but I barely got any. The money I did receive, I donated to an organization that supports disabled Israeli veterans. I wanted some money, so I started selling books that my parents were getting rid of, on eBay. I eventually sold tens of thousands of books. I got very good at putting together just the right postage stamps for each pound of media mail. Eventually, I sold other things like piezoelectric flash rocks and cell phone boosters; all sorts of ridiculous things. I don’t remember how much I made, because I invested it all in the stock market, but it probably was a decent amount. When I went to college, I couldn’t maintain a physical inventory of books, so I gave the business to my younger brother, and I started selling concert tickets on eBay instead.
“I majored in Middle Eastern languages and civilizations at Yale. It was interesting to me to see the roots of this extremely anti-Semitic evil cloaked in ostensibly good liberal values. I wanted to better understand it. I spent a lot of time in the Middle East, working in Egypt for two summers and studying Arabic on a government fellowship in Morocco. I led Yale community service trips. I traveled around Syria and Lebanon. I could pass as an Arab. I rarely told people I was Jewish, because whenever I did, it didn’t go over well. In the end, I decided that I wasn’t going to accomplish much in terms of Israel-Palestine issues.
“At Yale, I did the Maimonides program with some Orthodox students and hung out with rabbis at the Chabad there. I spent a weekend at the house of a great entrepreneur and leader in the Orthodox community. It gave me a different perspective.
“I launched my first startup when I was almost finished with college. It was a food delivery service, sort of like Uber Eats, called Favorite Sandwich of Yale. Lots of college kids ordered a specific sandwich every night from a popular local place, so I made a simple one-click food ordering website that allowed them to pay for it and have it delivered straight to their door. The idea came partly from a cognitive science class I took at Yale with Professor John Bargh, who taught me a lot about how the conscious and the unconscious mind works. He was the best professor I had there. To a decent degree, he is responsible for humanity’s current understanding of the way the unconscious mind works. Today, he works with me at AE.
“I wanted to reduce choice fatigue and let people order exactly what they wanted when they wanted it. Several hundred thousand orders of that one sandwich were placed, and the next thing I knew, I was running a food delivery company called CrunchButton. We eventually expanded across the country to 50 different college campuses with different restaurants and their own delivery drivers. In most restaurants we expanded to offer the entire menu, but we kept the one-click ordering so that a sleep-deprived college student or an 85-year-old grandmother could push a single button and get their food delivered without having to think about it.
“After five years, we had the opportunity to sell, but we weren’t in a position of strength after some corporate politics with a chain restaurant that accounted for a third of all our orders. Instead, we wound down. I realized I had spent many years of my life doing food ordering, and now I wanted to do something more impactful.
“My wife was a software developer at the time, and I realized that I would be able to live very happily off her salary for the rest of my life. That realization allowed me to think much more deeply about the long-term future of technology and the future of humanity and how to have the biggest positive impact on it. I was, in a way, foreseeing the world that we’re entering right now.
“I understood then that artificial intelligence was going to transform everything. We had built a lot with AI at the food delivery company, like optimal delivery writing algorithms and so on. I also thought a lot about how technology was increasingly manipulating people to do things they don’t really want to do, and that it is in fact better business sense to do right by your end users, to increase human agency instead of allowing them to be manipulated. For instance, companies incentivize people to spend as much time as they can doom scrolling through social media.
“The fundamental realization I had—and this has been proven by data—is that in the long run, it’s actually bad for the company, too. Facebook data scientists announced a couple of years ago that they were going to stop that kind of incentivization because they realized that ultimately it made people come back less. They spent longer in short time sessions, but they returned less frequently and rated their experience worse than they would have done otherwise.
“I figured that it makes more business sense to increase your end users’ agency. Agency, in this context, means being able to do what you want to do when you want to do it and not being manipulated to do things you don’t want to do. It means technology serves as an extension of your own goals.
“I decided to create a software AI development company that builds products for clients. I took no outside funding so I could retain control in the future. The idea was to use the profits from that business to build our own internal startups, based on the principles of increasing human agency, improving the quality of human life and preventing AI from killing all of humanity.”
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