Quantified Uncertainty Research Institute

The Quantified Uncertainty Research Institute (QURI) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit based in Berkeley, California, that advances forecasting and epistemics to improve the long-term future of humanity. Founded by Ozzie Gooen in 2019, QURI grew out of his earlier work on Guesstimate, a web-based spreadsheet tool for modeling with probability distributions that he launched as a startup in 2016.

Gooen left the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford to join QURI full-time in 2020, and the organization began expanding its research and engineering efforts. Nuno Sempere joined the team in 2020 to work on longtermism, forecasting, and quantification, and built Metaforecast, an aggregator and search tool for predictions across multiple forecasting platforms. Slava Matyuhin joined in 2022 as a software engineer working on Squiggle and Squiggle Hub.

QURI's flagship project is Squiggle, a minimalist probabilistic programming language designed for intuition-driven quantitative estimation rather than data-driven statistical analysis. Released in Early Access in 2022, Squiggle allows users to work with probability distributions, build estimation models, and reason about uncertainty. During 2023, QURI published eight releases of Squiggle (v0.6.0 through v0.9.0) and launched Squiggle Hub, a free and open-source community platform for sharing and collaborating on Squiggle models. In 2023, the Guesstimate company was also formally merged into QURI, and Rethink Priorities became QURI's fiscal sponsor for operations and employment.

More recently, QURI has been exploring applications of large language models to its tools and research workflow. In late 2025, they upgraded Squiggle AI to support newer models and released RoastMyPost, an application that uses LLMs to evaluate blog posts and research documents. In early 2026, Gooen published work on automated research wikis using AI code generation tools.

QURI operates with a small team. Ozzie Gooen serves as Executive Director and is the sole full-time employee. The organization works with contractors and research collaborators including Nuno Sempere (now at Sentinel) and Eli Lifland (an AI safety researcher and top forecaster). Board members include Abigail Olvera (Research Director at Golden Gate Institute for AI) and Ben Goldhaber (Director at Far Labs), with Peter Wildeford (co-founder of IAPS) serving as advisor.

QURI has been funded by the Survival and Flourishing Fund (over $650,000 cumulatively by mid-2022, plus $62,000 in 2024), the Future Fund ($200,000), the Long-Term Future Fund, and individual donors. QURI maintains its own 501(c)(3) for key organizational assets but uses its fiscal sponsorship with Rethink Priorities to handle operations and employment.