I think everything hinges on the funding unfortunately…
Most of the projects on my list require some $200–500k in the first year to get started, and then can scale to a few million per year over time. The large-scale retrofunding needs to start higher – $10m might work, $100m works for the XPrize, $1b could be the goal.
The natural starting point is the incubator itself, which falls into the $200–500k range, but more towards the upper end to provide seed funding for the incubated projects.
Why did Guesstimate/Squiggle as for-profit not work out?
I’d love to have a call and catch up in any case! I’m curious whether you already have an opinion on whether places like DeepMind will be interested in paying for evals like the two types mentioned here (character and backdoors).
“Why did Guesstimate/Squiggle as for-profit not work out?” I’ve been asked this question a bunch of times before, happy to give some quick thoughts here. Most of my answer is here.
If it were the case that it seemed very easy to make these as startups, and ideally in which there were some clear cofounders who could handle the business side, I think the for-profit side would have been more promising.
In my case: 1. I realized this was a niche/small space, that getting a large market would likely mean having to pivot. 2. I wasn’t sure what might take off. I think Squiggle has a lot going for it, but am not sure if the value proposition is strong enough for a large company now, especially as LLMs have been getting much more powerful (changing the trade-offs around decision tools). 3. My main goal was helping effective altruist / rationalist researchers, and I suspected that focusing much more on commercialization would have hurt that. 4. Related to (3), I just found myself much more motivated to go after altruists/nonprofits than to go after standard enterprise deals
“I’d love to have a call and catch up in any case! I’m curious whether you already have an opinion on whether places like DeepMind will be interested in paying for evals like the two types mentioned here (character and backdoors).”
Quickly: 1. I’ll schedule a call sometime, once I understand my schedule a bit better. 2. I have incredibly little info on DeepMind right now. As you may imagine, personally I’m excited about a lot of these areas, but I can’t speak for DeepMind.
Surplus sounds useful!
I think everything hinges on the funding unfortunately…
Most of the projects on my list require some $200–500k in the first year to get started, and then can scale to a few million per year over time. The large-scale retrofunding needs to start higher – $10m might work, $100m works for the XPrize, $1b could be the goal.
The natural starting point is the incubator itself, which falls into the $200–500k range, but more towards the upper end to provide seed funding for the incubated projects.
Why did Guesstimate/Squiggle as for-profit not work out?
I’d love to have a call and catch up in any case! I’m curious whether you already have an opinion on whether places like DeepMind will be interested in paying for evals like the two types mentioned here (character and backdoors).
“Why did Guesstimate/Squiggle as for-profit not work out?”
I’ve been asked this question a bunch of times before, happy to give some quick thoughts here. Most of my answer is here.
If it were the case that it seemed very easy to make these as startups, and ideally in which there were some clear cofounders who could handle the business side, I think the for-profit side would have been more promising.
In my case:
1. I realized this was a niche/small space, that getting a large market would likely mean having to pivot.
2. I wasn’t sure what might take off. I think Squiggle has a lot going for it, but am not sure if the value proposition is strong enough for a large company now, especially as LLMs have been getting much more powerful (changing the trade-offs around decision tools).
3. My main goal was helping effective altruist / rationalist researchers, and I suspected that focusing much more on commercialization would have hurt that.
4. Related to (3), I just found myself much more motivated to go after altruists/nonprofits than to go after standard enterprise deals
“I’d love to have a call and catch up in any case! I’m curious whether you already have an opinion on whether places like DeepMind will be interested in paying for evals like the two types mentioned here (character and backdoors).”
Quickly:
1. I’ll schedule a call sometime, once I understand my schedule a bit better.
2. I have incredibly little info on DeepMind right now. As you may imagine, personally I’m excited about a lot of these areas, but I can’t speak for DeepMind.