Epoch looks at more types of data, including Usage, Compute Spend, and Valuation.
Epoch does not look at projections, either those made by the company itself or by extrapolating the current trend.
Differences in methodology, for the things we both consider:
Epoch uses reports of annualized revenue (the revenue in a month x12), while I focus on annual revenue (the amount of revenue a company received in a calendar year). I discuss this in the post. The results are similar for OpenAI, the only company I have decent revenue data for.
Epoch does not use estimates for the number employees made by market research organizations, like LeadiQ or RocketReach. Instead, they focus on media reports of the number of employees. This difference does have significant consequences.
The number of employees from market research organizations is often higher than the media reports used by Epoch.
For Anthropic, the media reports Epoch used have been lower than the data I used, but they are converging.
For OpenAI, the data were similar until the end of 2023 (8 years since the company was founded). After this, the media reports have been about a factor of 2 lower than the market research organizations.
I do not know why this discrepancy exists. The market research organizations do not publish their methodology, but they presumably have incentives to provide accurate information, and so their estimates should be reasonable. Media reports from organizations like TheInformation also have incentives to be accurate, and try to avoid publishing unverified numbers. For OpenAI in particular, Noam Brown has cautioned against the higher numbers.
If we accept Epoch’s data for number of employees, then OpenAI is growing at a rate of 1.7x per year and Anthropic is growing at a rate of 3x per year. In 2027, OpenAI would have 7400 employees and Anthropic would have 14,000 employees. In 2030, OpenAI would have 37,000 employees and Anthropic would have 360,000 employees. In 2033, OpenAI would have 180,000 employees and Anthropic would have 9.4 million employees. In 2033, Anthropic would be larger than any company today, and larger than the entire US tech industry. This would be dramatic, although it still seems like this would be less of a limitation than receiving all global wealth as capital.
The biggest differences:
Epoch looks at more types of data, including Usage, Compute Spend, and Valuation.
Epoch does not look at projections, either those made by the company itself or by extrapolating the current trend.
Differences in methodology, for the things we both consider:
Epoch uses reports of annualized revenue (the revenue in a month x12), while I focus on annual revenue (the amount of revenue a company received in a calendar year). I discuss this in the post. The results are similar for OpenAI, the only company I have decent revenue data for.
Epoch does not use estimates for the number employees made by market research organizations, like LeadiQ or RocketReach. Instead, they focus on media reports of the number of employees. This difference does have significant consequences.
The number of employees from market research organizations is often higher than the media reports used by Epoch.
For Anthropic, the media reports Epoch used have been lower than the data I used, but they are converging.
For OpenAI, the data were similar until the end of 2023 (8 years since the company was founded). After this, the media reports have been about a factor of 2 lower than the market research organizations.
I do not know why this discrepancy exists. The market research organizations do not publish their methodology, but they presumably have incentives to provide accurate information, and so their estimates should be reasonable. Media reports from organizations like The Information also have incentives to be accurate, and try to avoid publishing unverified numbers. For OpenAI in particular, Noam Brown has cautioned against the higher numbers.
If we accept Epoch’s data for number of employees, then OpenAI is growing at a rate of 1.7x per year and Anthropic is growing at a rate of 3x per year. In 2027, OpenAI would have 7400 employees and Anthropic would have 14,000 employees. In 2030, OpenAI would have 37,000 employees and Anthropic would have 360,000 employees. In 2033, OpenAI would have 180,000 employees and Anthropic would have 9.4 million employees. In 2033, Anthropic would be larger than any company today, and larger than the entire US tech industry. This would be dramatic, although it still seems like this would be less of a limitation than receiving all global wealth as capital.