Jaime Sevilla at an Epoch AI retreat in Oxford, 2023. At retreats, employees brainstorm projects and do short research hackathons.magine if the world’s response to climate change relied solely on speculative predictions from pundits and CEOs, rather than the rigorous——models of climate science."Two degrees of warming will arrive soon-ish but will change the world less than we all think," one might say."Two degrees of warming is not just around the corner.
Sevilla, bottom left, alongside members of the founding team in a meeting room at Epoch's first retreat in April 2022. During this event the members decided to constitute an organization and chose the name Epoch with the assistance of a Twitter poll.in Torrejón de Ardoz, an industrial suburb of Madrid. His early interest in technology led him to pursue degrees in mathematics and computer engineering from the Complutense University of Madrid.
In 2020, Sevilla began a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence at the University of Aberdeen. Trapped at home by COVID-19 restrictions and feeling out of place as a sun-loving Spaniard in gloomy Scotland, he had time to think more seriously about where AI might be headed. “Surprisingly, there was no one doing systematic analysis of what has been the trend in machine learning over the last few years,” he says. “I thought: well, if nobody's doing it, then I better get to it.
He and Villalobos began spending their spare hours pouring over hundreds of academic papers, documenting the amount of computational power and data used to train AI models of significance. Feeling confident in the importance of this work but daunted by the size of the task, Sevilla put out a call for volunteers, the respondents to which went on to become the initial Epoch AI team. Together, the small group documented the critical inputs of every significant AI model ever created.
Researchers at Epoch AI now aim to go one step further by using their research on historical trends to inform predictions of AI’s future impacts. For example, in apublished in November 2022, Epoch AI analyzed how the amount of data being fed into AI models was increasing with time and estimated how much useful data is readily available to AI developers. The researchers then pointed out that AI developers might soon run out of data unless they came up with new ways of feeding their creations.