Here’s my prediction for this! Awesome proposal, I enjoyed reading it. I wrote up more of my thought process here, but a brief overview:
It would help a lot to know the base rate of EA initiatives succeeding past the first year. I couldn’t find any information on this, but it possibly does exist
It wasn’t entirely clear to me what the impact you expect from this project is, which made it hard to estimate cost effectiveness.
I suspect a lot of the indirect impact (building EA connections, converting researchers to EA philosophies) will take a while to manifest
I wanted to know more information about the expected time cost of organizing this, as this would make it less cost effective.
I say this in the post above, but since this may be relevant to decisions you make I want to caveat that I only spent ~1 hour on this! I’d love to hear if you agree/disagree (here’s a blank distribution for the question if you want to create your own.
This was really interesting to forecast! Here’s my prediction, and my thought process is below. I decomposed this into several questions:
Will OpenAI commercialize the API?
94% – this was the intention behind releasing the API, although the potential backlash adds some uncertainty [1]
When will OpenAI commercialize the API? (~August/September)
They released the API in June and indicated a 2 month beta, so it would begin generating revenue in August/September [2]
Will the API reach $100M revenue? (90%)
Eliezer is willing to bet there’ll be 1B in revenue from GPT-like services in 2025. This broader than just the revenue from the OpenAI API, but is also a lot more than 100M
A tiny list of industries OpenAI API will affect, to give reference points:
Journalism: 63B in 2014 in the US (100M is 0.1% of this)
Gaming: 159B globally in 2020 (100M is 0.06% of this)
Chatbot: 2.6 billion globally in 2019 (100M is 3.8% of this)
It seems absurd to me that OpenAI wouldn’t generate 100M from the API *at some point*, but I’ve adjusted down because it’s easy to be overconfident about exciting tech like this
If it does reach $100M, when will it?
This article suggests that SaaS companies started in the last 15 years took 8 years to reach $100M ARR
The question asks about total revenue not ARR, so this timescale would be a lot shorter
What do you think? Are you more bullish on it generating 100M sooner? (My median was April 17, 2022 – this seems like it could be a bit late, but ultimately I’m not that certain in the 2021 – 2024 range). Here’s a blank distribution if you want to make your own!