At Encultured, we believe advanced AI technology could be used to make the world a safer, happier, and healthier place to live. However, we also realize that AI poses an existential risk to humanity if not developed with adequate safety precautions and attention to the geopolitical consequences of deployment plans. Given this, our goal is to develop products and services that help humanity collectively to steer toward the benefits and away from the risks of advanced AI systems.

Our current main strategy involves building a platform usable for AI safety and alignment experiments, comprising a suite of environments, tasks, and tools for building more environments and tasks. The platform itself will be an interface to a number of consumer-facing products, so our researchers and collaborators will have back-end access to services with real-world users. We're starting with a singular focus on video game development, because we think that will offer the best feedback loop for testing new AI models. Over the next decade or so, we expect an increasing number of researchers — both inside and outside our company — will transition to developing safety and alignment solutions for AI technology, and through our platform and products, we’re aiming to provide them with a rich and interesting testbed for increasingly challenging experiments and benchmarks.

Like any start-up, we’re pretty optimistic about our potential to grow and make it big. And, we've incorporated as a for-profit company with a public benefit mission — to develop technologies promoting the long-term survival and flourishing of humanity and other sentient life — and we think the safe integration of AI technology with humans is going to be key to that objective. Still, we don’t believe our company or products alone will make the difference between a positive future for humanity versus a negative one, and we’re not aiming to have that kind of power over the world. Rather, we’re aiming to take part in a global ecosystem of companies using AI to benefit humanity, by making our products, services, and scientific platform available to other institutions and researchers.

Also, fun! We think our approach to AI has the potential to be very fun, and we’re very much hoping to keep it that way for the whole team :)