Economists run a secret prediction game each year.

 

• Economists, hedge fund investors, and tech executives compete in a forecasting contest each year.
• OpenAI's ChatGPT participated in the 2025 game for the first time.
• The competition tested AI's ability to make predictions without clear online content as a guide.

The ability to forecast the future is a valuable sign of intelligence and a good test of AI's capabilities. How good is ChatGPT at prediction?

An answer to this fascinating question emerged recently when economist David Seif wrapped up an annual forecasting contest he runs for a secret group of economists, hedge fund investors, and tech executives.

In its seventh year, the challenge requires contestants to predict roughly 30 events. The 2025 game kicked off in late 2024, when Seif sent out the list of events to predict in fields such as politics, business, science, economics, pop culture, and sports.

One question asked the contestants to forecast whether Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce would announce their engagement by April 1. Another: Would Bulgaria adopt the euro as its official currency on or before July 1?

Sam Leffell, a director at a hedge fund firm, was filling out his probabilities in December and had an idea.

"When I was answering the questions, I had the ChatGPT screen up. I wondered, what it will say to these questions?" he recalled in a recent interview.

ChatGPT had to learn complex rules

Leffell reached out to Seif to ask if ChatGPT could take part, and Seif said, go for it. So, Leffell got started by pasting the game's rules into ChatGPT.

These are complex rules, covering multiple pages. Contestants must assign a percentage based on the likelihood of each event happening. As the results come in over the year, these predictions are scored a bit like golf. The lowest score wins.

"You get points equal to the square of the difference between what you put and the results," Seif said.

You can get the full post on Businessinsider.com.