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!

My predictions for:

1. AI researchers

2. Historians

Notes:

1. I chose AI researchers because then I could use Grace et. al. as directly as possible, and I chose historians because I expected them to differ the most from AI researchers

2. I worked on this for about 30 min, so it's pretty rough. To make it better, I'd:

a. dig into Grace et. al. more (first data, then methods) to learn more about how to interpret the results/what they tell us about the answer to Linch's question

b. read other expert surveys re: when will AGI come (I think AI Impacts has collected these)

(JTBC, I work at Ought)

Here’s my prediction. Based on this timeline, I started out thinking it would be quite a while (10+ years) before all 50 states legalized recreational marijuana. This paper caused a pretty significant update towards thinking that federal legalization was more likely sooner than I had previously thought. I also found this map useful for getting a quick sense of the current status.

Curious what you think - here’s a blank distribution if you want to make your own.

Here’s my prediction for this. It’s pretty uncertain, and I expect others have perspectives which could narrow the range on this forecast. Some thoughts:

• Although the same algorithms can be generalized, we’re still at the stage where agents have to be trained on individual games [1] [2] [3] [4]
• It’s really hard to quickly get a sense of how this will progress and what the challenges are without knowing more about the technical research
• Given that, my prediction is very uncertain over the range, but bounded by AGI timelines

Does this seem in line with what you expected? Do you know of any good ways to estimate how fast this kind of research will progress? If anyone else has insight that would increase the certainty over a range, you can edit my snapshot or create your own here.

I misread the post as asking for a personal forecast. Since I now realize it's possible to ask questions of any type, I would much rather delegate a forecast on an important topic, such as:

How many standard deviations away from the mean will the 1000th human born from stem-cell derived gametes score in a test of cognitive ability taken at the age of 18?

Here’s my Q1 2021 prediction, with more detailed notes in a spreadsheet here. I started out estimating the size of the market, to get reference points. Based on very rough estimates of CEA subscriptions, # of people Effective Altruism Coaching has worked with, and # of people who have gone through a CFAR workshop, I estimated the number of EAs who are interested enough in productivity to pay for a service to be ~8000. The low number of people who have done Effective Altruism Coaching (I estimated 100, but this is an important assumption that could be wrong since I don’t think Lynette has published this number anywhere) suggests a range for your course (which is more expensive) of ~10 to 45 people in Q1. Some other estimates, which are in the spreadsheet linked above, gave me a range of $8,000 to $42,000. I didn’t have enough time to properly look into 2021 as a whole, so I just did a flat 10% growth rate across all the numbers and got this prediction. Interestingly, I notice a pressure to err on the side of optimistic when publicly evaluating people’s companies/initiatives.

Your detailed notes were very helpful in this. I noticed that I wanted more information on:

• The feedback you got from the first course. How many of them would do it again or recommend it to a friend?
• More detail on your podcast plans. I didn’t fully understand the $10 lessons – I assumed it was optional $10 lessons attached to each podcast, but this may be wrong.
• How much you’re focusing on EA’s. The total market for productivity services is a lot bigger (here’s an estimate of $1B market value for life coaching, which encompasses productivity coaching).

Do these estimates align with what you're currently thinking? Are there any key assumptions I made that you disagree with? (here are blank distributions for Q1 and 2021 if you want to share what you're currently projecting).

Here's my prediction! My median is October 3, 2020. If you want to keep checking in on this, the Bureau of Consular Affairs is helpfully tracking their passport backlog and how many they're processing each week here.

Was this in line with what you were expecting?

My forecast is pretty heavily based on the GoodJudgment article How to Become a Superforecaster. According to it they identify Superforecasters each autumn and require forecasters to have made 100 forecasts (I assume 100 resolved), so now might actually be the worst time to start forecasting. It looks like if you started predicting now the 100th question wouldn't close until the end of 2020. Therefore it seems very unlikely you'd be able to become a Superforecaster in this autumn's batch.

[Note: alexrjl clarified over PM that I should treat this as "Given that I make a decision in July 2020 to try to become a Superforecaster" and not assume he would persist for the whole 2 years.]

This left most of my probability mass given you becoming a Superforecaster eventually on you making the 2021 batch, which requires you to both stick with it for over a year and perform well enough to become a Superforecaster. If I were to spend more time on this I would refine my estimates of how likely each of those are.

I assumed if you didn't make the 2021 batch you'd probably call it quits before the 2022 batch or not be outperforming the GJO crowd by enough to make it, and even if you didn't you made that batch you might not officially become a Superforecaster before 2023.

Overall I ended up with a 36% chance of you becoming a Superforecaster in the next 2 years. I'm curious to hear if your own estimate would be significantly different.

Also had misunderstood this as being personal questions. If you prefer, replace me with something like:

A randomly selected person from the top ~50 recently active Metaculus users (so maybe this list or this one), excluding those who are already supers.

Here's my forecast. The past is the best predictor of the future, so I looked at past monthly data as the base rate.

I first tried to tease out whether there was a correlation in which months had more activity between 2020 and 2019. It seemed there was a weak negative correlation, so I figured my base rate should be just based on the past few months of data.

In addition to the past few months of data, I considered that part of the catalyst for record-setting July activity might be Aaron's "Why you should put on the EA Forum" EAGx talk. Due to this possibility, I gave August a 65% chance of hitting over the base rate of 105 >=10 karma posts.

My numerical analysis is in this sheet.