The Prediction Singularity Is Upon Us

"To live in time is to wonder what will happen next. In every human society, there are people who obsess over the world's patterns to predict the future. In antiquity, they told kings which stars would appear at nightfall. Today they build the quantitative models that nudge governments into opening spigots of capital. They pick winners on Wall Street. They estimate the likelihood of earthquakes for insurance companies. They tell commodities traders at hedge funds about the next month's weather."

"Players may be asked whether a coup will occur in an unstable country, or to project the future deforestation rate in some part of the Amazon. They may be asked how many songs from a forthcoming Taylor Swift album will top the streaming charts. The forecaster who makes the most accurate predictions, as early as possible, can earn a cash prize and, perhaps more important, the esteem of the world's most talented seers."

"These tournaments have become much more popular during the recent boom of prediction markets such as Polymarket and Kalshi, where hundreds of thousands of people around the world now trade billions of dollars a month on similar sorts of forecasting questions. And now AIs are playing in them, too. At first, the bots didn't fare too well: At the end of 2024, no AI had even managed to place 100th in one of the major competitions. But they have since vaulted up the leaderboards."

Humans have long created methods to anticipate future events, from ancient stargazers to modern quantitative modelers advising governments and markets. Elite forecasters compete in tournaments that probe general forecasting skill with diverse questions ranging from coups and deforestation to music-chart outcomes. Prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi have expanded public participation and traded large sums monthly. Artificial intelligences entered these forecasting contests and initially performed poorly, with none placing in the top 100 at the end of 2024. Subsequently, AI entrants climbed leaderboards and demonstrated superhuman accuracy in constrained tasks, raising the prospect of outperforming humans on broader, messy world predictions. Metaculus hosts a triannual tournament.

Read at The Atlantic