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Is it not enough to simply watch the beautiful game, unadorned?
These days you might use an AI chatbot to keep abreast of what’s happening in the World Cup. And that AI chatbot, in a sign of the times, might try to shove prediction market odds in your face as another way of ostensibly keeping you up to speed. Because are you really getting the full picture if you don’t know where a bunch of gamblers fall on the outcome?
This is exactly what OpenAI is doing. The Sam Altman-led company quietly struck a deal with Kalshi, which lets you bet on outcomes far beyond sports, to show its prediction market data in ChatGPT, the New York Times reported.
It’s perhaps the inevitable melding of two of the most divisive innovations to come out of the tech industry in recent years.
Searching France and Spain on ChatGPT ahead of their quarterfinal clash on Tuesday returned a graphic that showed that Les Bleus had a 60 percent chance of winning, according to the reporting. (We hope no one acted on that information.) Asking about the England and Argentina game on Wednesday showed that the Three Lions had a 54 percent chance of coming out on top.
Neither side promoted the deal, and the graphic is tellingly light on branding. There are no logos and no outbound links. The only sign of the collab is a small notice in the bottom left corner stating, “Source: Kalshi.”
This is the first partnership of its kind for OpenAI. The company recently updated its help page to stress that users “cannot place bets through ChatGPT,” with the Kalshi data being limited to “queries related to the 2026 World Cup,” according to the NYT.
Zooming out, it’s another sign of prediction markets laundering their image by glomming themselves onto other, more credible brands. In January, Kalshi partnered with CNN to provide its real-time prediction data on the news network’s broadcasts. Its rival Polymarket entered into a similar partnership with Dow Jones, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal, that same month. Both have also partnered with Google to show their data in search results.
Unlike traditional betting platforms, prediction markets don’t frame what they provide as gambling: they provide markets, not bets. They allow you to wager on all kinds of real-life events, ranging from the geopolitical outcomes to the completely trivial. Polymarket lets you bet on the destruction caused by wildfires and the use of nuclear weapons, for example, while also giving you the chance to make a buck on whether Cristiano Ronaldo will cry at the World Cup. (He did.)
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