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Epoch is a research group forecasting the development of transformative Artificial Intelligence. We try to understand how progress in AI happens and what economic impacts we might see from advanced AI.
We want to enable better governance during this economic transition by gathering information about the timing of new developments, studying which levers can be used to influence AI progress and making current and past trends in ML more understandable.
Founded in April of 2022, Epoch currently has a staff of 13 people, corresponding to 9 FTEs. We have received $1.96M in funding through a grant from Open Philanthropy. We are fiscally sponsored and operationally supported by Rethink Priorities, whose Special Projects team has been a core part of our success as an organisation.
Epoch is fundraising a total of $6.07M over 2 years, or approximately $2.64M for October 2023 to September 2024, and $3.42M for October 2024 to September 2025. A detailed budget can be found in the full report.
With this funding, we expect to continue and expand our research capacity in understanding the future of AI. Through our research, we hope to continue informing about key drivers of AI progress and when key AI capabilities will be developed.
You can now donate to Epoch and subscribe to our newsletter.
Read the full report to learn about our key insights this year, an overview of our research and non-research activities, and our plans for the future.
Epoch is one of the coolest (and in my opinion underrated) research orgs for understanding trends in ML. Rather than speculating, they meticulously analyze empirical trends and make projections for the future. Lots of interesting findings in their data! – Jacob Steinhardt
Thank you for sharing this!
A small suggestion for readibility: can you make sure to spell out acronyms the first time you use them? It took me a bit of time to realise that "OOM" was "order of magnitude", before realising that it was spelt out but two lines below (I'd previously seen it used for "out of memory" and in the context of object-oriented programming).