Samotsvety Forecasting

Samotsvety Forecasting is a distributed collective of some of the world's best superforecasters, named after the Soviet-era musical ensemble Samotsvety. The group originated as a Slack channel where co-founders Misha Yagudin and Nuno Sempere discussed forecasting questions, eventually formalizing into a team that competed on platforms such as INFER (formerly CSET-Foretell), Good Judgment Open, and Metaculus. The group won first place in the INFER forecasting competition in both 2020 and 2021, its last two full years of participation, and by 2022 occupied four of the top five spots in INFER's all-time rankings. Scott Alexander described their performance as "around twice as good as the next-best team in terms of the relative Brier score." In 2022 the group correctly forecast Russia's invasion of Ukraine and ranked fourth on Insight Prediction's leaderboard, collectively profiting approximately $32,000 from prediction markets. The team comprises roughly 15 members recruited by invitation, selected based on strong forecasting track records from competitive platforms. Members include Misha Yagudin (co-founder, also runs Arb Research consultancy), Nuno Sempere (independent consultant at Shapley Maximizers), Eli Lifland (AI alignment researcher, Foxy Scout), Jonathan Mann, Juan Cambeiro, Molly Hickman, Tolga Bilge, Greg Justice, Jared Leibowich, Alex Lyzhov, and Pablo Stafforini, among others. Several members hold the Superforecaster designation from the Good Judgment Project. Samotsvety has published major public forecasting reports on the EA Forum and LessWrong, covering nuclear escalation risk, AI risk and timelines, AGI development, and existential risk precursors. They have also received consulting requests from organizations including the FTX Foundation and distributed $10,000 in micro-grants to support forecasting work. Arb Research, co-founded by Misha Yagudin, serves as a sister organization handling commercial consulting work.