AF - AI forecasting bots incoming by Dan H

The Nonlinear Library: Alignment Forum

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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: AI forecasting bots incoming, published by Dan H on September 9, 2024 on The AI Alignment Forum.
In a recent appearance on Conversations with Tyler, famed political forecaster Nate Silver expressed skepticism about AIs replacing human forecasters in the near future. When asked how long it might take for AIs to reach superhuman forecasting abilities, Silver replied: "15 or 20 [years]."
In light of this, we are excited to announce "FiveThirtyNine," an AI forecasting bot. Our bot, built on GPT-4o, provides probabilities for any user-entered query, including "
Will Trump win the 2024 presidential election?" and "
Will China invade Taiwan by 2030?" Our bot performs better than experienced human forecasters and performs roughly the same as (and sometimes even better than) crowds of experienced forecasters; since crowds are for the most part superhuman, FiveThirtyNine is in a similar sense. (We discuss limitations later in this post.)
Our bot and other forecasting bots can be used in a wide variety of contexts. For example, these AIs could help policymakers minimize bias in their decision-making or help improve global epistemics and institutional decision-making by providing trustworthy, calibrated forecasts.
We hope that forecasting bots like ours will be quickly integrated into frontier AI models. For now, we will keep our bot available at
forecast.safe.ai, where users are free to experiment and test its capabilities.
Quick Links
Demo:
forecast.safe.ai
Technical Report:
link
Problem
Policymakers at the highest echelons of government and corporate power have difficulty making high-quality decisions on complicated topics. As the world grows increasingly complex, even coming to a consensus agreement on basic facts is becoming more challenging, as it can be hard to absorb all the relevant information or know which sources to trust. Separately, online discourse could be greatly improved.
Discussions on uncertain, contentious issues all too often devolve into battles between interest groups, each intent on name-calling and spouting the most extreme versions of their views through highly biased op-eds and tweets.
FiveThirtyNine
Before transitioning to how forecasting bots like FiveThirtyNine can help improve epistemics, it might be helpful to give a summary of what FiveThirtyNine is and how it works.
FiveThirtyNine can be given a query - for example, "Will Trump win the 2024 US presidential election?" FiveThirtyNine is prompted to behave like an "AI that is superhuman at forecasting". It is then asked to make a series of search engine queries for news and opinion articles that might contribute to its prediction. (The following example from FiveThirtyNine uses GPT-4o as the base LLM.)
Based on these sources and its wealth of prior knowledge, FiveThirtyNine compiles a summary of key facts. Given these facts, it's asked to give reasons for and against Trump winning the election, before weighing each reason based on its strength and salience.
Finally, FiveThirtyNine aggregates its considerations while adjusting for negativity and sensationalism bias in news sources and outputs a tentative probability. It is asked to sanity check this probability and adjust it up or down based on further reasoning, before putting out a final, calibrated probability - in this case, 52%.
Evaluation. To test how well our bot performs, we evaluated it on questions from the Metaculus forecasting platform. We restricted the bot to make predictions only using the information human forecasters had, ensuring a valid comparison. Specifically, GPT-4o is only trained on data up to October 2023, and we restricted the news and opinion articles it could access to only those published before a certain date.
From there, we asked it to compute the probabilities of 177 events from Metaculus that had happened (or not ha...