Show HN: FutureSearch – answer hard questions like "Who will buy TikTok US?"

22 points

2 years ago

Now that the TikTok ban is on its way to Biden’s desk, you may ask: “Will ByteDance get this overturned in court?” “How much is TikTok US worth?” “Will Oracle and Walmart bid again?”

Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity, etc. have almost nothing to say on questions like these that involve judgment, uncertainty, modeling, and in-depth research. (Try it for yourself.)

FutureSearch draws on the fact that professional forecasters do surprisingly well on such questions. We’ve worked with many of them over the years, and we’ve built their research workflows with LLMs and agent loops.

Here's what FutureSearch found:

  - Biden will sign the bill (>95%)

  - The Commerce Secretary will start the 12 month clock (>95%)

  - TikTok will challenge the ruling (>95%), which may delay the clock starting to delist or divest, but they are unlikely to win (20%)

  - And if they lose, they will succeed in selling to a US company (75%)

  - The sale will be for $30-50B (CI 50%), assuming it does not include certain ByteDance IP

  - Walmart and Oracle won’t compete to buy it this time. Microsoft or Amazon are the top contenders, along with a consortium led by Susquehanna or Steven Mnuchin, possibly in partnership with Snap or X.

FutureSearch justifies its stats and cites its facts. For example, the 75% chance that TikTok will sell if forced to comes from checking outcomes of the most similar events, notably Grindr in 2019 which did lead to a sale: https://app.futuresearch.ai/forecasts/ZYMek/public#PAST.

It searches for statements and historical actions of key people, like Steve Mnuchin, Biden, TikTok execs. That TikTok has a 20% chance to overturn this in court draws on a model where FutureSearch estimates only 13% of similar cases rule in favor of the company: https://app.futuresearch.ai/forecasts/Tn2Aa/public.

You can see more on our methods at https://github.com/varunaai. If you’d like to try it, email us at [email protected], and we’ll give out quota as capacity becomes available.

3 comments

- Biden will sign the bill (>95%) - The Commerce Secretary will start the 12 month clock (>95%) - TikTok will challenge the ruling (>95%), which may delay the clock starting to delist or divest, but they are unlikely to win (20%) - And if they lose, they will succeed in selling to a US company (75%) - The sale will be for $30-50B (CI 50%), assuming it does not include certain ByteDance IP - Walmart and Oracle won’t compete to buy it this time. Microsoft or Amazon are the top contenders, along with a consortium led by Susquehanna or Steven Mnuchin, possibly in partnership with Snap or X.