AI Beats Humans In Predicting Future At International Competition

An AI system has beaten a number of human forecasters.

Dhaka, 21 September- A British artificial intelligence (AI) startup co-founded by a former Google DeepMind researcher has been ranked in the top 10 of an international forecasting competition, which requires participants to forecast the likelihood of 60 events over the summer.

The startup, Mantic AI, was ranked eighth in the Metaculus Cup, where participants were required to predict events such as the public spat between US President Donald Trump and his once-close ally Elon Musk, and Kemi Badenoch's removal from the Conservative Party leadership, according to a report in The Guardian.

Though ManticAI did not secure the top place, lagging behind the best human forecasters, experts predict that AI could be on par or better than humans by 2029. Deger Turan, the chief executive of Metaculus, admitted that Mantic's achievement in the competition was "impressive".

"It's certainly a weird feeling to be outdone by several bots at this point. We've really come a long way here compared with a year ago when the best bot was at something like rank 30," said Ben Shindel, one of the professional forecasters who found himself behind AI.

Prior to the competition, participants had predicted that the top bot's score would be 40 per cent of the top human performers' average. However, Mantic managed to achieve over 80 per cent.

“Some say LLMs just regurgitate their training data, but you can't predict the future like that. It requires genuine reasoning. You could say our system's predictions were more original than most human entrants, because people often cluster around the community average predictions," said Toby Shevlane, the co-founder of Mantic.

For the predictions, Mantic breaks down different jobs and assigns them to machine-learning models, including OpenAI, Google and DeepSeek, depending on their strengths.

AGI near?

As AI models increasingly become accurate in predicting the future, experts believe that they could be nearing Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), also known as human-level AI. A research paper published by Google DeepMind has predicted that AGI could arrive as early as 2030.

What is AGI?

AGI takes AI a step further. While AI is task-specific, AGI aims to possess intelligence that can be applied across a wide range of tasks, similar to human intelligence. In essence, AGI would be a machine with the ability to understand, learn, and apply knowledge in diverse domains, much like a human being. - UNB