Every three months, participants in the Metaculus forecasting cup try to predict the future for a prize pot of about $5,000. Metaculus, a forecasting platform, poses questions of geopolitical importance such as “Will Thailand experience a military coup before September 2025?” and “Will Israel strike the Iranian military again before September 2025?”
Forecasters estimate the probabilities of the events occurring—a more informative guess than a simple “yes” or “no”—weeks to months in advance, often with remarkable accuracy.
Metaculus users correctly predicted the date of the Russian invasion of Ukraine two weeks in advance and put a 90 percent chance of Roe v. Wade being overturned almost two months before it happened.
Still, one of the top 10 finishers in the Summer Cup, whose winners were announced Wednesday, was surprising even to the forecasters: an AI. “It’s actually kind of mind blowing,” says Toby Shevlane, CEO of Mantic, the recently-announced UK-based startup that developed the AI.
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