AI To Predict Future? British Startup Could Soon Overtake Human Forecasting Experts

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

ManticAI ranked eighth in the Metaculus Cup, run by a San Francisco-based forecasting company that tries to predict the future for investment funds and corporations, according to The Guardian. Some believe that the bot’s prediction skills could soon overtake human forecasting experts.

The contest required participants 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.

Questions also included which party would win the most seats in the Samoan general election and how many acres in the US would be burned by fires from January to August.

Although ManticAI’s performance lagged behind the best human forecasters, experts believe the AI ould be on a par or better than the best human forecasters by 2029. Deger Turan, the chief executive of Metaculus, said human forecasters are currently “doing better than AI forecasters”.

AI Vs Humans In Forecasts

ManticAI typically breaks down a forecasting problem into different jobs and assigns them to a roster of machine-learning AI models including OpenAI, Google and DeepSeek. Turan told The Guardian that AI systems are still struggling to carry out logic verification checks when translating the knowledge into a final prediction.

However, Toby Shevlane, the co-founder of Mantic, hailed its performance as a milestone for the AI community by using large language models for forecasting. “You could say our system’s predictions were more original than most human entrants, because people often cluster around the community average predictions. The AI system often strongly disagreed. So, AI forecasters could be an antidote to groupthink,” he said.

Mantic’s system employs a range of AI agents to analyse current events, conduct historical research, model potential scenarios, and predict likely outcomes. A key strength of AI forecasting lies in its ability to work tirelessly and persistently, which boosts effective prediction. They can effortlessly tackle dozens of complex problems simultaneously and revisit them daily to learn from evolving information.

However, human forecasters were still beating their AI companions as of now. Philip Tetlock, the co-author of the bestselling book Superforecasting, found that expert humans were on average still outperforming the top-performing AI bots.