AI systems have crossed the threshold into superhuman forecasting ability, matching and in some cases beating top human experts and frontier models on real-world forecasting benchmarks.
Dan Schwarz says Future Search, founded in 2023 on the premise that AI would eventually become a superhuman forecaster, believes that threshold has now been crossed, with the shift happening rapidly in just the last six months. ✦ AI generated
Dan Schwarz · The Cognitive Revolution · 2026-07-07 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 61:15
“the title of the post is the AI super forecasters are here. So tell us about it.”
future search was founded under the premise that eventually we would get to this superhuman level and yeah we claim that level uh has arrived. It's all very sudden. You know, we've been operating this company for about three years and it's really in the last six months that these things have started to really scare and impress us in their capabilities.
verbatim transcript · starts at 61:15
61:15>> Yeah. Um Scott was actually one of the first people to see the very first AI forecaster. Depends how you define forecaster. You know time series forecasting has existed for decades in AI and machine learning. It all depends how you define those terms. Uh but future search was started in uh 2023. We started building a forecaster before GBD4 turbo had even come out. We used claude 2. It's very early days. Uh Scott
61:38tried our forecaster then and was not super impressed and I don't think really anybody was back then. But of course future search was founded under the premise that eventually we would get to this superhuman level and yeah we claim that level uh has arrived. It's all very sudden. You know, we've been operating this company for about three years and it's really in the last six months that
61:56these things have started to really scare and impress us in their capabilities. I think the main thing to remark about forecasting is that it's it's a very important capability, but it is someone neglected. Described it as hyped, but really the whole field of forecasting is only about 15 years old. Prior to Tetlock, nobody was even studying accuracy at all. Nobody was recording predictions in a resolvable way and scoring them to give us even the
62:18most basic scientific evidence on what was going on. Um even before Tetlock, many of us were enthused by prediction markets, but that was a very human technology. Prediction markets are very big right now. Um as you said, Posh, I built the one that's currently running at Google. I think that's great. Uh but that's a way of trying to augment and coordinate human intelligence. Of course, we're more interested in
62:37artificial intelligence now. And so it's taken a little bit of time. You know, Midjourney was already very good at generating images. I don't know exactly how you would compare image generation, audio generation, you know, writing essays, doing coding, math, all the other capabilities that we normally track. At what point it became human, superhuman, it all depends on how you define it. Uh forecasting, if anything, is a bit late to the game, but now that
62:57it's here, it really changes the nature of what forecasting even is. You mentioned that in the last six months you have started to see things which are uh one step up or different from what you were seeing before. Can you can you elaborate? >> Yeah, I think uh the trouble with this and a lot of Scott's post was trying to cover the level of evidence because the
- ·Future Search founded in 2023 on premise AI would surpass humans
- ·Dan Schwarz: that superhuman threshold has now been crossed
- ·Shift happened suddenly, mostly in the last six months
- ·Capabilities now 'scare and impress' the company's founders
- ·Company has operated for about three years
- ·Real capability jump concentrated in just six months
- ·Founders describe the change as very sudden