Esben Kran is an entrepreneur who aims to inspire and execute on positive visions for a secure future with artificial intelligence. His work is focused on new directions to make AI safer, increasing awareness about the problems and inspiring the next generation of researchers and hackers.
He is currently the director and founder of the non-profit research institute Apart and sits on the board of Effective Altruism Denmark and the European Network for AI Safety. He has received grants for his work in AI safety from Open Philanthropy, Lightspeed Grants, the Future Fund, Manifund, the Cooperative AI Foundation, the Survival and Flourishing Fund, and the Long-Term Future Fund.
With an early passion for technology, I co-founded an indie game development studio that received publishing deals with XBox and Nintendo. After realizing that games were not going to have the positive impact I sought, I analyzed the how impactful 14 contemporary technologies would be and where I could have a unique impact. My top list included space colonization, AI safety, gene editing and extended reality. Meanwhile, I traveled to Thailand without enough money to get home to push myself to earn enough from web design and consulting (which I did).
After looking through the technologies, I chose to focus on brain-computer interfacing since AI would be too dual-use: I studied cognitive science, was a data science consultant with work ending up at the Prime Minister's desk during covid-19, was a lead data scientist at eachthing, co-founded NeurotechX Denmark, set up a state-of-the-art lab with functional near-infrared spectroscopy at Aarhus University and developed a pre-trained LSTM on brain data and fine-tuned it for thought classification before venturing to the Bay Area to try my luck in the BCI industry in 2022.
Instead, I ended up talking with AI safety researchers and entrepreneurs who made me reconsider when I expected artificial general intelligence to come about. After thinking about how Github Copilot was writing more than 15% of my code, I quickly realized that this would be transformative and that safety was paramount. From there, I founded Apart Research, and the rest is history.
