Ege Erdil

We connected on, like, some – on a Discord for Metaculous, which is this forecasting platform.

And I was –

I was a graduate student at Cambridge at the time doing research in economics, and I was having conversations with my peers there, and I was occasionally having conversations with Ege, and I was like,

This guy knows a lot more about economics.

And at the time, he was a computer science undergrad in Ankara.

And he knows more about economics and about these big trends in economic growth and economic history than almost any of my peers at the university.

And so, like, what the hell is up with that?

So we started having frequent collaborations and ended up hiring Ege for Epoch because it clearly makes sense for him to work on these types of questions.

Yeah.

So I was at MIT doing more research and I was pretty unhappy with the bureaucracy there where it was very hard for me to scale projects up, hire people.

And I was pretty excited about a bunch of work that my PI wasn't excited about because it's maybe hard to publish or it doesn't confer the same prestige.

Mm-hmm.

And so I was chatting with Jaime Sevilla, one of the co-founders, and we just collaborated on projects and then thought we should just start our own org because we can just hire people and work on the projects we were excited about.

And then I just hired a bunch of the insightful misfits.

I think it's more of the latter.

So it was more like we can make a bunch of progress because clearly academia and industry is kind of dropping the ball on a bunch of important questions that academia is unable to publish interesting papers on.

Industry is not really focused on producing useful insights.

And, and so it seemed like very good for us to just do that.

And also the timing was very good.

So we started just before, you know, chat GPT and we wanted to have much more grounded discussions of the future of AI.