Mantic

Something is happening!

HUMANS OF MANTIC Hours after we launched our website, before we’d posted it anywhere, I saw a job application from a Oxford economics PhD student from Brazil: “I’ve never been this excited about a startup. I want to help build it.” His background was not typical for an AI startup. But he looked impressive. He’d got a distinction from Yale then spent 3 years as an economist at Goldman Sachs. In his PhD research, he was using LLM forecasters to identify exogenous shocks to fiscal policy. We invited him to lunch with the team. He seemed smart. Ben messaged me: “we should try to get Gabriel to come in for September”. In his first couple of days, Gabriel was reading the code. I wasn’t seeing much output. I asked Ben, what is he doing? Ben told me to wait. Then...Gabriel emerged with an understanding of our prediction engine that was like he’d worked here for months. He started finding weaknesses and generating good ideas. Throughout September, Gabriel was running experiments to test his fixes, and the guy did not miss. +3 points on this eval, +3 points on that eval. To boot, he’s an lovely person. Gabriel grew up in Rio. He speaks about his childhood friends and Brazilian culture (the beach, the food) with joy in his eyes. It must have been a big culture shock turning up to New Haven as a freshman. From the beaches of Rio to Camden's hottest AI startup, @gabrielpfritsch started in a permanent role today, as Member of Technical Staff.

📈Trends in AI performance in the Metaculus Cup, a large-scale forecasting tournament. The top-5 AI frontier makes linear progress vs the community prediction (CP). The CP is a wisdom of the crowds aggregate. Only a small handful of elite forecasters, from 500+ entrants, beat the CP each tournament. Extrapolating the AI trend line predicts CP-level performance in October 2027. A new trend started last Summer. Mantic progresses at a similar speed, but at a much higher level. The last tournament has just resolved, and Mantic beat the community, the first time ever for an AI.

For our launch party, we made fortune cookies with Mantic's predictions for what the world would look like on 1st Jan 2026. How well did we do? The predictions were from Aug 14th. 1. Nvidia market cap on 1st Jan 🔮 $4.52 trillion (median, with a mode of 4.75) ➡️ $4.53 trillion 😎 😎 😎 2. Trump Nobel Peace Prize 🔮 94% he doesn’t win ➡️ Didn’t win 3. Jair Bolsonaro imprisoned 🔮 40%. Modal date if it happens: Oct 17th. ➡️ Imprisoned in November. 4. China launches Taiwan invasion 🔮 98% no ➡️ No invasion 5. A Chinese model top of the LMArena leaderboard 🔮 16% ➡️ No, Gemini 3 is top. 6. Jerome Powell as Fed Chair 🔮 85% still going ➡️ Still going! 7. US cuts the scheduled 50% tariffs on India 🔮 69%. Mantic read it as a negotiating tactic. ➡️ No ❌  Still there! 8. Xi Jinping out 🔮 95% still in power ➡️ Still going 9. Bank of England base rate 🔮 43% chance of 4% rate. 50% chance it’s lower, 7% chance higher. ➡️ 3.75% rate Overall these look pretty good to me. Perhaps 2026 will be the year of superhuman forecasting accuracy... 📈

I gave a talk about AI for forecasting at the Society for Technological Advancement (@sotalikesfuture) in London. The short talk covers: - What we're doing at @_Mantic_AI, including the example of possible 🇺🇸 strikes on Venezuela that we automatically spotted in late Sept. - Benchmarking! 📊 I'm worried the forecasting benchmarks are getting saturated. - The idea that good foresight = forecasting accuracy + prescience. It was fun meeting everyone -- there's lots of excitement in the space! 🚀

SoTA's first Frontiers Night is complete! A series of brilliant talks, demos & case studies with a lively panel comprising Toby Shevlane (@tshevl), Michael Story (@MWStory), Ben Warner, and Tom Oliver on Forecasting the Future. We discussed the art & science of prediction across AI forecasting, simulating human behaviour, and leveraging crowdsourced intelligence to make better-informed decisions. Thank you to Faculty for hosting the Society for Technological Advancement (@sotalikesfuture)! Look out for our next Frontiers Night on Self-Driving Labs in the new year and send suggestions for future themes & demonstrators. @_Mantic_AI, @swift_centre, @faculty_ai, Electric Twin

I had a fun conversation with superforecaster @rdeneufville on his podcast! We discuss: 🤖 How does AI compare to human superforecasters? 🧱 Is there a data wall? ⏱️ Why to expect fast progress on sub 1-year prediction horizons 🔎 The importance of asking the right question Link in reply, and please enjoy this short clip, with background image courtesy of Gemini (reality: in a phone booth with smaller arms)

If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs

The Market Pulse competition is for finance predictions: company earnings, treasury yields etc. We competed in Q3 and finished: - 19th / 122 entrants - Highest ever AI - 2.3x the score of the next best AI 🎯 Our best prediction was Nvidia forward guidance on margins (bullish).

@Polymarket 20%

JUST IN: While the markets are panicking about Trump's 100% tariff threat on China, Polymarket isn't buying it. Only 13% chance they go into effect. poly.market/iYGDV0i

Inside look: our quest to beat the top human forecasters.

For those interested in forecasting, our new report compares political science expert predictions of democratic erosion w/those of @metaculus forecasters & AI forecasts from @_Mantic_AI Check out the full US Democracy Threat Index we co-created with @metaculus at the link below

We've been assembling a world-class technical team, and we're only just getting started. If you are reading this, you are still early. 🚀

A historic milestone for the AI community: Mantic has been quietly participating in a forecasting tournament against 550 humans all summer. We finished 8th, beating some pro forecasters.

@metaculus We'll do our best 🤞

Hey @_Mantic_AI metaculus.com/questions/3979… (just launched)

That's my kind of fortune cookie