Decades ago, U.S. intelligence showed that a crowd of 10,000 well-informed enthusiasts could match the accuracy of its geopolitical analysts with far fewer resources. Within that group, a minority of super-forecasters managed to improve their results. Today that same logic is being applied to questions about the war in Ukraine, the Russian assets frozen in Brussels, or the evolution of U.S. aid to Kyiv. Accordingly, some international outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, CNN, or CNBC have already incorporated the traditional prediction markets into their news offerings.
Agenda Pública, in our commitment to improving the quality of public debate, will from now on combine the usual in-depth analyses, which help our readers understand the causes, incentives, and consequences of a decision, with AI-based scenario predictions, which can help better identify what elements we should prioritise in an increasingly complex public debate and move away from mere speculation. For Agenda Pública readers, the synthetic prediction markets arrive from The Forecasting Machine.
“The tool we are proposing to our readers is based on a synthetic prediction market”
The Forecasting Machine should be understood as a bet on innovation, but above all for better content. If traditional prediction markets add the intelligence and forecast of real people and incorporate human expert intelligence, the tool we propose to our readers is based on a synthetic prediction market: through the use of artificial intelligence, it accesses all publicly available information and open sources, aggregates all major language models (LLMs) on the market and weighs the predictions that are proposed.
Therefore, in some of our main analyses, we will incorporate this additional way of addressing current affairs: less focused on short-term noise and more attentive to the scenarios that may shape the coming months. We will do so knowing that, although synthetic prediction markets do not offer certainties nor do they pretend to, they can help distinguish between what is possible, what is probable, and what is merely speculative. An additional approach to understanding an increasingly uncertain world.
The use of this special kind of AI tool, used with editorial judgment and transparency about its purpose, can contribute to providing a complementary perspective, turning those scenarios into probabilities, making explicit the hypotheses on which we work, and offering readers an additional frame of reference to situate themselves in the face of changing scenarios. An investment in innovation that we share, once again, with our readers.
