Thank you so much for the thoughtful reflections and your support, Austin - it genuinely means a lot to our team.
Regarding Esben's transition, we want to provide more context to help clarify how we're approaching this inflection point. Esben has transitioned to a position as chairman of the board and is the interim CEO with the main task of finding a strong replacement together with other board members and the rest of the leadership team (Jason and Jaime).
While Esben is building Seldon to complement Apart's work as a for-profit sister organization, we view the efforts as mission-aligned but distinctly scoped: Apart remains focused on accessible, public-good-driven AI safety research and mid-career talent incubation. The launch of Seldon creates an opportunity for even stronger synergies between mission-driven research and adequate speed-of-scaling of important AGI security technology.
With recent strategy retreats in conjunction with the fundraiser, the whole team is excited for the changes that are currently happening: Reprioritization of key projects, deploying learnings from our impact evaluations, restructuring our academic involvement for further direct impact, building out our Sprints team to evolve higher frequency sprints and quarterly frontier research workshops, and a reorganization of our org structure to accommodate all these changes and more.
As mentioned in our update, we are excited to keep all our supporters up-to-date and involved in a dedicated newsletter as we maximize the impact of every dollar donated during this campaign. Again, thank you and everyone who's taken part in our journey.
- The Apart Research Team