AI Is Learning to Predict the Future—And Beating Humans at It

Nikita Ostrovsky

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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. When the competition opened in June, participants predicted that the top bot’s score would be 40% of the top human performers’ average. Instead, Mantic achieved over 80%.

“Forecasting—it’s everywhere, right?” says Nathan Manzotti, who has worked on AI and data analytics for the Department of Defence and General Services Administration, along with about a half dozen U.S. government agencies. “Pick a government agency, and they definitely have some kind of forecasting going on.”

Forecasters help institutions anticipate the future, explains Anthony Vassalo, co-director of the Forecasting Initiative at RAND, a US government think tank. It also helps them change it. Forecasting geopolitical events weeks or months in advance helps “stop surprise” and “assist decision makers in being able to make decisions,” Vassalo says. Forecasters update their predictions based on policies enacted by lawmakers, so they can predict how a hypothetical policy intervention is likely to change future outcomes. If decision makers are on an undesirable track, forecasters can help them “change the scenario they’re in,” says Vassalo.