GoKawiilThe annual prediction market conference was earlier this month. This was the year prediction markets went from an obscure hobby to a multi-billion dollar industry; from semi-illegal to having the President’s son as an advisor. I can’t remember if anyone talked about any of that. It didn’t even register. All eyes were on the AI superforecasters.
I met an AI superforecaster startup founder who told me his AI had turned $35 into $2 million on Kalshi over seven months. I met another who said they were beating the stock market by 25% with a market-neutral portfolio - of course this could be luck, but they’d beaten Kalshi and Polymarket by similar margins.
In fact, I believe all of these people. The extending-lines-on-graphs community has long predicted that AIs would beat the best human forecasters sometime in 2026 - 2027. What did you expect the bots-finally-beat-humans-at-predicting-the-future moment to look like? Vibes? Papers? Essays? In retrospect, sure: it will look like AIs making crazy profits on prediction markets and beating the stock market by some comfortable amount.
But what happens next?
Using An AI Superforecaster
Before getting into details, what exactly are we talking about?
An AI superforecaster is an AI - usually a frontier model like ChatGPT or Claude - which has been modified to be good at forecasting. This usually means a “scaffold” - a program that handholds it through a long research process with various prompts, tools, advice about when to create subagents, etc. The overall experience is a lot like using any other AI, but slower and more expensive, because it’s doing more work.
This might make more sense with an example. FutureSearch - the company that claims to be beating the stock market - kindly offered to let me try their AI superforecaster and write about it here.
For a test question - some Silicon Valley philanthropists recently started a project to end respiratory infections like the common cold. I decided to ask about their chances of success. Since forecasters need very precise questions, I asked how likely it was that the rate of colds would be cut in half by 2040:
By two minutes in, the AI had deployed three subagents, read 16 websites, and (at the exact moment I took this screenshot) was “investigating the scalability of ASHRAE Standard 241 air cleaning technology for widespread residential adoption by 2040.”
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