Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49543191

Points: 70

# Comments: 32

What's the simplest explanation?

Thank you Ed!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49536633

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49200796

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49200199

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49197340

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

AI forecasting is now approximately superhuman. Today, FutureSearch is exiting our long public beta and launching.

We started FutureSearch in August 2023. (We’re the original AI forecasting company, at least in a Tetlock-ian, “forecast anything” sense.) We’re currently #1 of 194 in the most competitive AI forecasting tournament [1], and we score above the #3 and #2 human forecasters in the premier mixed human-bot tournaments [2].

Many people on HN seem to equate forecasting with prediction markets and finance. FutureSearch is not a financial tool, in the same way that “deep research” is not a financial tool. Yes, we do evaluate our forecaster on prediction markets [3]. But forecasting is about being as accurate about the future as possible, and the real game is in forecasting scientific progress, geopolitics, and the future of humanity. Our founding team came from Metaculus, where we pushed human forecasting to the limit on questions like when AGI would arrive. At. FutureSearch, we co-authored the AI 2027 timeline forecast, where we predicted superhuman coding and research would come around 2032, longer than the other authors, but still shorter than skeptics [4].

Thousands of people used the FutureSearch beta and ran >10k high-effort forecasts, on all sorts of diverse topics. Ask it anything about the future. We now support decision forecasts too: “If I do X, will I achieve this outcome?”

Forecasting, as a capability, is useful even at the level of expert human crowds. But we predict that we will soon have strongly superhuman forecasting. People who bet against AI capability trend lines tend to lose, and the trend line in AI forecast accuracy tells a pretty clear story [5]. There’s no reason to think the best human forecasters have figured out everything predictable about the world. There’s a lot more signal to be found.

And if you’re skeptical, try it. We’ve seen our fair share of exaggerated claims about AI forecasting accuracy [6]. So part of the reason we made the free tier give a few of our highest effort forecasters free is to let anyone verify the quality.

[1] https://www.metaculus.com/tournament/summer-futureeval-2026/ [2] evals.futuresearch.ai [3] markets.futuresearch.ai [4] https://ai-2027.com/research/timelines-forecast [5] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-ai-superforecasters-are... [6] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uGkRcHqatmPkvpGLq/contra-pap...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49157941

Points: 11

# Comments: 0

When my apples are expensive, I don't generally grumble about all the demand from pie makers. If they demand more apples, new suppliers should come in to restore the price, right?

But this is just bad vibecoding? This would be bad if humans did it too. With agents or humans, you need to coordinate.

The exception is when it's about a niche I care about, e.g. an analysis of opening trends of early world chess champions. I'll read AI on that for an hour.

My sense is that, for most writing, it's fundamentally interpersonal, the information is about the author as much as it is about the world.

Maybe this flood of slop will cause people to care more about the substance of the writing, not the perspectives of the writing.

But why evaluate AI forecasters by beating the market? Do we evaluate deep learning by whether hedge funds make money from it in the markets? These things have far, far more utility outside of finance.