UK based artificial intelligence startup, ManticAI, has dethroned most human forecasters in an international prediction competition, ranking eighth overall in the Metaculus Cup.
AI solutions providing services company, co-founded by a former Google DeepMind researcher, surpassed scores of prediction analysts and professionals in estimating 60 summer events and made to top 10 ranks.
Predictions count from political developments involving Donald Trump and Elon Musk to whether Kemi Badenoch would remain Conservative party leader.
The AI system scored particularly well on questions ranging from electoral outcomes to environmental events like U.S. wildfire acreage.
Ben Shindel, a seasoned forecaster who just ranked above the AI winner: "It is 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 300,” Shindel concluded.
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The major milestone marks the success of large language models in forecasting, challenging assumptions that AI merely regurgitates training data rather than engaging in genuine reasoning.
In addition to that, ManticAI's system employs multiple machine-learning models from OpenAI, Google, and DeepSeek, breaking down forecasting problems into specialized tasks handled by different AI agents.
Metaculus CEO Deger Turan estimates AI will match top human forecasters by 2029 but emphasized that currently human forecasters are doing better than AI forecasters.
Meanwhile, the experts believe that human forecasters still maintain an overall edge, particularly on complex questions requiring logical verification and judgment on interrelated events.
The competition results have sparked discussion about the future of forecasting rather than rendering human predictors obsolete.
