AI Predicts Its Own Rise (and Fall)

0:00Humans have all sorts of opinions on where AI as a technology is going over the coming years. But has anyone asked AI how it feels about it? In today's episode, AI is making its own predictions about the future and to come up with the focus areas that are the most likely to see the highest levels of growth. I'm joined by Max Child and James Wilserman, who are my co-hosts at the Cerebral Valley AI Summit. Today, we're letting AI make its own five-year plan. This is the Newcomer Podcast.

0:35All right, we're back on the Newcomer podcast. I'm Eric Newcomer. I'm here with James Wilsterman and Max Child. They're joining us for our Cerebral Valley podcast edition ahead of Cerebral Valley AI Summit next week, getting close. Last week, we talked about some AI themes and did our draft pick for top AI startups. This one, we're looking at the future. We're One year ago, Max, James and I reacted to predictions from OpenAI and Anthropic and made bets on those. So we're going to quickly review how each of us did. So you know who's good at making predictions and who's not. And then we will do a new round of predictions for next year.

1:20So I'm going to hand it over to James, who is running, tracking all this, the scorekeeper. James, how did we do last year? Yeah. Just run all these games for you guys. Yeah, we made predictions. What was interesting last year is we had Claude and OpenAI ChatGPT generate the predictions as well as give us a probability estimate of how likely they would to occur within 12 months. So all three of us took overs or unders on the probabilities. And then we can check back now, 12 months later, to see how we did. So running through last year's slate of predictions, the first prediction was phrased as, will OpenAI release GPT-5 exceeding 10 trillion parameters?

2:10We are calling that not met, did not happen. The second prediction from ChatGPT, national AI regulations in healthcare diagnostics. By the end of this year, at least three countries will have implemented these national health care regulations governing whether you can use AI when diagnosing illness at a 70 % probability. Also calling that not met. The third prediction was, will Tesla be approved for legal operation of unsupervised self-driving cars in one state with no drivers? We are saying no, that did not happen as well. OpenAI gave that a 40 % probability. The fourth prediction from ChatGPT was by the end of this year, AI-generated content would be constituting at least 50 % of all news articles published by one major news outlet with a 30 % probability where you're saying that was not met either.

3:16No known major outlet has... I hear that newcomer media has 70 of its articles generated by ai these days i would like to i would like to litigate that that's a major outlet that's that's what i'm hearing from the ground eric fact none of our articles none yeah none none oh my god none that you're aware of um okay uh the last problem the last prediction from chat gbt was um at 21st 25 probability that at least one ai generated film both the script and the visuals would be released in theaters um i i'm kind of quibbling with the uh the outcome of this one where there was at least one film released in turkey in maybe at least one theater but uh max and i have agreed to uh i'm allowed to bribe one theater owner in turkey and call that an over that's absurd i'm sorry no i agree i agree there's no u.s films Come on.

4:16Yeah. We're saying that did not happen. But apparently there is a film called post truth. If anyone wants to check that out. In Turkey only. Showing for one day. If you happen to be. Yeah. If you happen to be in Turkey. Okay. If you're keeping score at home. None of the predictions happened. That is my own takeaway. So AI's predictions about what would happen in the world of AI. It didn't say they would all have them, but they all gave a possibility. A lot of them had above 50 % probabilities. Right. So AI clearly thought they would happen. Yeah. So who is the most foolhardy? Who thought too much stuff was going to happen?

4:58It's very straightforward. Whoever guessed who's the most upbeat did the worst, and whoever's the most pessimistic did the best. So what are your dispositions? I'll read off some scores here. we gave each other some points or took away points depending on whether we took the over-under on the probability. And I came in last place with negative point two.

5:27I'm sorry. I'm sorry. This is funny. I was way too overly optimistic. Which that fits. Too many overs. Too many overs. Yeah. Yeah. I was going to definitely adjust my strategy a little bit this year. And then in second place with 0.7 was Eric. So congrats, Eric, on that. A respectable positive score. Not underwater. And then Max with 1.6 points in this probability scoring calculus wins the day. lots of good nothing ever happens yeah nothing ever happens amigos i'm excited for this year's prediction you guys ready to play again yes i feel like we've all been chastened we've all learned our lessons yes all right so a little intro for this year's predictions we asked three brilliant math olympiad winning ais chat gpt gemini and claude to make predictions of what will happen in the next 12 months in AI.

6:34We ask them to assign probabilities, which is important to understand. It thinks something's unlikely. It thinks something's very likely. We take the over-under on those probabilities, and then we get points based on how accurate we are against those over-unders. Obviously, last year, the message was nothing ever happens. It'll be interesting to see if in the next 12 months, something does happen. All right. Let's kick it off with ChatGPT. I use chat GPT 5 Pro for these, by the way, just in case you wanted to understand what model. Ultra sync model. And the first prediction, we're arguing that by this time next year, the FCC will adopt a policy requiring on-air disclosure when AI tools are used in political ads.

7:19Under. Easy. What's the percentage? Wow. The probability is 65%. Under. Under. I just think the Trump FCC is very pro AI. So unless something wrong happens, they're not going to do anything AI regulatory. If it was a Harris administration or something like that, then that would be plausible. But 65 is a crazy over. Right. Yeah, I'll take the under. I think, yeah, to your point, what is the Trump administration doing at all? I mean, there's no actual laws being passed, right? I mean, half the government's shut down. They're trying to get Jimmy Kimmel off the air. they're like fewer humans they're like like less humans on the air more ai baby yeah but they use one of those canes and they pull him off they don't actually pass a lot um fair enough but i think uh i think they're like the ai is very pro trump let's keep it on the air yeah all right all right well that was a quick one easy um easy easy start moving on um okay this is interesting prediction from chat gpt by this time next year major outlets report open ai's annualized revenue has hit a run rate of over 30 billion oh oh man i need to talk to my what's what's the probability here you need to talk to your source on the insider well tom tom covers this closely for us I'm like, I don't track.

8:49I thought you were texting Sam or something. Well, Sam, I could, but not that it would help. But Sam, he went on that interview with Brad Gerstner. Yeah, Brad Gerstner and was saying they were over 13 already. Let's see. I've internalized some numbers. You want to guess the line here? 70? I don't know. 60 %? Very aggressive. Okay. All right. That was a pretty good guess. it was i'm i'm gonna take the over at 60 because i think they're probably at least at 15 right now and doubling in a year if they don't double in the year the entire u.s economy is gonna collapse so we're not gonna be we're not gonna be having a predictions podcast if they get 2x in the next 12 months uh they don't have to say it right and it just has to be reported that they like yeah Yeah, yeah.

9:41Reported that it's rough then. It's probably over 30. So, Max, you are taking the over despite every previous prediction last year landing in the under. Well, I just think, again, as a connoisseur of ARR growth rates, as a voice AI startup founder, James and I, Volley Incorporated, you have to double every year, basically, to be a quote unquote high growth venture startup, even at the open AI level where they're trying to do this IPO at a trillion dollars. And so I think to our earlier discussion, Sam Alman literally said on a podcast they were over a 13 billion dollar rate. So I will give them at least a 15.

10:18And I think that might be low. And if they don't double in a year. Yeah. I mean, the the U.S. economy and the entire chips and energy story will probably collapse. So this podcast will be canceled. So we will not be hosting a conference. But there has to be. Yeah. The reporting lags like the reporting lag. I mean, OK, if we're getting into it again, when is it going to be reported? yeah i don't know i mean you're sitting here in this chair in a year you know what's the what's the what did sam just say on on the podcast right yeah look i'm gonna i'm gonna go with what i believe to be the truth which is i believe they will be at over 30 12 months from today it's a little bit hard for me to start hedging this prediction but waste on whether or not it's reported at that point or not so i'm just gonna just gonna go with what i believe to be the reality 12 months from today yeah i'm gonna i'm gonna snag the under just uh just to yeah nothing ever happens yeah just what is your reasoning is it just my lesson or is you like is it the reporting or you believe they will actually be under 30 at that point i think it'll be close no matter what um i think that yeah i think there's a lot of competition heating up in this in in ai and you know we don't know what how how we don't know how uh how much demis cooked over at google yet for uh gemini uh three so let's uh yeah let's see how it plays out i am going to take the under i'm chastened you know maybe all over correct i mean you know maybe this is the year that things happen yeah no i mean i think i think i think the over is totally a valid play okay next prediction this one's from chat gpt5 thinking meta in their 10k or earnings um or in various major news outlet um sources report 2026 shipments for meta's display equipped glasses to exceed 1 million meta ray-ban display 799 ugly you can get them in in sand or in black under i'm gonna grab the under yeah i i just i think this is in the nothing ever happens category i think they might try to like do shipments in sort of some sort of bizarre way but i the reviews are not very good uh once people actually have them oh really yeah um there were these early try on reviews where they were like you know the verge can try them for three minutes at at the meta conference and they were like oh my god these are amazing but i've started reading reviews of people who actually bought them like a normal person at best buy and they're like actually that's kind of suck i will say holding my baby this is gonna be terrible this is what the but it's just like you know eventually you want to like scroll at some point you're like oh my god like how many feeding this thing for like hours on end this is how i got to do nice tiktok as i've explained yeah exactly times the 3 a.m one airpod and tiktok scrolling while feeding my baby but i feel bad like i want both hands feeding the baby you know it's like now you'll get you'll get over that part pretty quickly.

13:31No, you'll get to one hand bottle nestling mindset. And then you can scroll with the other hand. It's great. Right. Yeah, I'm doing it already. So you're going to buy a million. How many are you going to buy, Eric? I said the under still. I'm still saying the under. I'm not going to buy them. And I'm a pretty early adopter. Yeah, we both grabbed the under. James, what are you doing? No, I'm grabbing the under as well. I just don't. I think it's too complicated to buy this product. Like you've all been chastened. This performance last year is going to ruin. And we were having more fun last year.

14:04Yeah. Last year is like, anything get happened. We're naive and optimistic. Now we're like, oh, the world is sad. I took the over on open AI revenue for the record. You guys are three straight under so far. This is a tough hang. For anyone running a startup right now, MongoDB for startups is one of those programs that's looking to make the life of a founder easier. You get free credits on MongoDB Atlas, so your product's ready to scale from day one without worrying about database costs. They also throw in 200 million Voyage AI tokens, so you can start experimenting with AI features right out of the gate.

14:41You'll get one-on-one time with actual MongoDB engineers, people who can help you troubleshoot, optimize, and think through your next stage of growth. If you're building, scaling, or just trying to stretch your runway a little longer, MongoDB for startups can actually help. Head to mongodb.com forward slash startups to learn more. Let's move on. Let's grab three predictions from Claude this time. This time I used Claude 4.1 opus to generate some predictions. Hope you enjoy them. Let's see. Claude says Apple will acquire an AI company valued at over one billion dollars, 70 percent probability of this occurring by this time next year.

15:27Oh, man, I was ready to take it over, but the 70 percent is terrible. 70 percent. Come on. That's crazy high. Apple's only made like one acquisition in history over a billion dollars, which was Beats. And I think they look back on that as a mistake. That seems really high. yeah I mean I think they're like well we needed to build Apple music something something something whatever we make some money on the head they're still so why they wouldn't still use the beats brand if they thought it was a mistake no I think they knew they had to make money on beats I don't think it's been a massive financial mistake but I don't think anyone's looking back on that and being like that was a banger like we couldn't have music in-house you know I'm just you know it wasn't okay it wasn't like some smoking hole in the ground but I'm taking the under just yeah The odds are terrible.

16:12It's like it'd be exciting, you know, for I mean, a billion dollar acquisition isn't that big, you know, anymore. And Trump administration makes it easier. So the barriers are low. But, yeah, it would be once every couple of years Apple does something notable like that. So, yeah, it's just like the track record of not doing it. It's hard to take the over list. 70 percent. You're literally betting 70 percent over on something that has happened once in the last 20 years. like i mean that's the the base rate prior there is just really low i mean i i'm not saying it won't happen but it's just tough to to deal with that all right i'll take the under as well tempted but um yeah the base rates um not good all right um next one from claude the eu will fine at least one major ai company over 500 million euros for violating the ai act 60 probability god these probabilities are so fucking high i'm sorry the 60 i mean like the i'm ready to go over i'm i want to go over i want to be tempted by it over we're gonna we're gonna strike the ai act limitation right okay all right i feel like that's sure too random i don't know what that means i mean look the eu loves nothing more than fining large american companies for dumb shit that's literally what they get up every day to do in brussels and yet 60 for a half billion dollar fine is that's high that is high i mean like i feel like mark zuckerberg's got to do something really dumb and they've got to move on it very quickly so i mean there's gonna be all this copyright stuff what's the number it's 60 i feel like i should get rewarded more i feel like they're they're not giving us enough benefit for some of these numbers are too high okay i'm taking the over i'm taking the over 500 million i need to i need to have somewhere where you need to live a little you need to live a little yeah exactly i'm gonna i'm i've gotta grab the under here because i just think that the eu wants to not be a filled uh i was gonna say nation state a failed continent state or whatever the hell they're doing over there uh but in ai i think there's a little bit more fear that they're just falling fundamentally behind the rest of the world here and so i i don't think coming out with a banger fine in the next 12 months is what they're looking for i think we could have a lot of copyright action we saw the hysterical sora plagiarist copyright every copyright and then pull it back and and there's no you know there's all this hostility with trump so it's like oh so what what are you guys taking foreign affairs i'm taking the under he's taking the over yeah okay um i'll take the under as well um just going going full under under check really you really like it's just like learned your lesson yeah uh you get kicked off the podcast if you take no over you think all under yeah that's a good Not enough good drama if you don't take some overs.

19:20This one's interesting and kind of. It's AI-generated music will chart in the top 40 of the Billboard Hot 100. 40 % probability. I got to take the over on that. I feel like... Purely AI-generated music top 40? Yeah, charts in the top 40. Hold on. It doesn't say purely. I don't want to get into too much litigation here. but it needs to be mostly like the vocalist and vocals some i mean there's a little bit of a component needs to be no not just like no no i feel like the vocals like the it says ai part of it says a song where ai demonstrably generated the melody or the lyrics not just production or mixing okay so if it wrote it but there's a vocalist singing it we'll count that okay yeah or if the The melody, the vocalists.

20:14Yeah, I think a major part of the song is AI. I grabbed the over because this is being reported today that there's already AI music charting in the top 100. So all you need is a good enough song to get to the top four. Wait, what is that? Yeah, I will pull up the name of the artist, but it was very recently reported as in the last three to five days. Xavier Monet is charting, quote unquote, whatever that means. maybe not top 100 but let's say top you know 500 or something is an ai generated artist is now quote unquote charting already um top 40 is obviously high bar and the music industry kind of fucking hates these people so there's definitely some entrenched interest against it but i feel like now that we're seeing ai music actually charting i feel like top 40 is is doable at 40 in the next year and overs are more fun guys come on get in on getting on the over train i agree i just took it i'm going over i'm going i'm jumping on i'm jumping on the over train um i'm with you max like it just seems the the momentum is real um behind this have occurring and uh yeah man if this alone happened it's pretty revolutionary for all the you know ai haters watching this and be like, oh, the bullish AI people are having to eat their, get their comeuppance or whatever.

21:40I do think, man, if this one happened alone, if you, if you said that, you know, five years ago, you'd be like, what kind of lunatic? This article from Billboard says at least six AI or AI artists have debuted on various Billboard rankings in the past few months. But the figure That's a fly. That's, but we're talking about the main top. Top 40 is a, is a bigger stretch for sure. No, I mean, you definitely have to believe in an exponential progression here to get from random billboard charts to the top 40, but Xavier Monet became the first known AI artists to debut on a billboard radio chart, debuting at number 30 on the adult R and B chart.

22:24But that's like a subcategory. These are different charts. Yeah. So the main, the, the, the cool one is getting on the hot 100 i guess yep this is probably an aggressive prediction but it feels yeah i'm taking the under it's in play all right the under i'm taking the over max is over eric is under a major research lab will demonstrate an ai system performing novel scientific research that gets published in nature or science 35 probability i mean i think that there will be a scientific research discovery that is capable of being in those journals i'm just adjusting based on my experience being married to an academic which is that it takes a long time to get published in journals uh yeah it's like novelty novelty is hard yeah it's it says an ai system will be credited as having autonomously designed and interpreted an experiment that leads to a peer-reviewed paper in Nature or Science in the main journals?

23:28Novelty will be amazing, right? When these models can actually make a discovery on their own, we haven't seen that really happen. So I'm skeptical. Even putting aside the bureaucracy of the journals, I'm skeptical that the models would produce that level of novelty. I'll go out on a limb and take the over on this one just because I think there's a lot of incentive for the labs to make this happen because of people like us asking questions. That was my movie thesis that Riverson wrote. Runway. Runway would incentive us to go make an AI movie, yeah. Well, they bribed someone in Turkey to show it in two theaters and, you know, nothing happened.

24:12All right. Let's move on to some predictions from Gemini 2.5 Pro. Yeah, three more to go. Prediction. By this time next year, a major U.S.-based publishing house will be awarded a judgment of damages against a major generative AI company in excess of$50 million for copyright infringement. Ooh. Let's include settlements, right? Yeah, settlements. Reported settlements. Sounds good as well. Probability, 40%. So Anthropic just had this$1.5 billion settlement for stealing all the books for training data. Wasn't that$3 ,000 per book or something? So you said$50 million as the number? Yeah. Right. So I'm taking the over.

25:04That thought crossed my mind too. That settlement was insane. So I don't know,$50 million is low. $50 million feels very doable. for and given that there literally was a settlement on this exact topic of stealing books it was 40 over right i mean i feel like the over sounds good to me if that's the precedent i feel like that would have counted so we're like one for one on that having happened in the last 12 months in my opinion i'm picking the over like i there was already a huge settlement it's a tiny amount of money in the scale of ai i think yeah this is definitely gonna happen i'm taking the over as well um we haven't learned our lesson folks we're taking overs again we go on long enough and they're like i'm on tilt i've taken three overs yeah three straight overs james was trolled into it yeah all right next uh prediction from gemini apple will launch a new version of ios that introduces an on-device large-scale multimodal ai assistant capable of executing multi-step cross application tasks such as summarize the last five emails from my boss or draft a calendar event for friday with the relevant subject lines as the notes right relevant okay yeah no no way they're doing this in a way that users actually like and people find helpful i'm gonna go with over even at 80 which i know is very aggressive because i think this is literally the apple intelligence feature that they announced 18 months ago that that uh that did not ship that was famously delayed by a year uh but that year is supposedly coming to pass somewhere in the first half of next year so but even if i look at my like my contacts when they try to use whatever thinking like they're they ruin everything with this i agree like it might like literally i have a list of my favorites you guys are and i don't worry don't worry and like that's nice the uh you know it's it's just like they they ruin it they make it shorter it's like i have a nice long list and you like decide to make four of them big like how is that helping me you know no i i'm apple is not doing a lot of things right right now but i'm just on the you're like they're gonna do it anyway and it's no i'm like they announced this exact thing that james is describing and they failed to ship it and they basically had a whole come to jesus moment where they basically had to like fire the whole team that was responsible for this and replace it ironically with gemini so maybe that's why gemini is like got a little inside information on this so yeah anyway i'll take the over i just find it hard to believe they're going to delay it more than another year um and i think that the what they've what they've announced satisfies these obligations to the prediction all right you guys have to decide though yeah i already didn't already say i took the under on it you took the under i'll take the over with max on i think we have to have some rigor as long as we have some rigor around like they can't just say we did it like it needs to be something people actually use and don't just like turn off like somebody has to find some value in it like i actually think this is a pretty interesting prediction to debate because 80 is a really high probability right so like we're james and i are like this is fucking happening you know like i'm just saying they're destroying their phone my phone with the dumb shit that they're doing are they really gonna be so consumer unfriendly to do complicated multi-stage things that like destroy the user experience i i don't we believe in apple enough to say hey and also if the bubble burst and they're like hey we were we were high on kool-aid with everybody else we're we're not gonna be those people i don't know a lot could happen you know i'm interested to see how this prediction goes all right one more james gemini one more one more gemini let's see what we got unscripted triple a game the prediction from gemini is that at least one triple a video game having a marketing and development budget over 100 million dollars will be released in 2026 that has prominent real-time generative ai powered features such as dialogue real time is interesting probability probability 35 i mean i gotta grab the under on that i just james and i work james and i work in gaming um if there's anything we know about gaming it's that triple a studios take almost no risks right with these games when we see the indie game first like the indie games haven't done this yeah man i wonder who's gonna make an indie game with generated dialogue in real time launching sometime in november just tee this up you guys generate this prediction please come in come the end of the podcast is like coming from volley yeah i will i will i will say as someone who's intimately familiar with using real-time generated dialogue to make an indie game uh it's it's still harder than you think to make it generate interesting stuff for every player uh i mean yeah i think fort fortnite had some generative feature at one point um last year right or was it early this year where it was like Darth Vader was using 11 labs and generating stuff on the fly and

30:31so I don't know I would have counted that and I guess right I mean I guess really one day it was a one day thing and then they turned it off it's like me oh that's just yeah no that wouldn't count for this prediction right what's it say like a major feature or something it's like a new hundred million dollar triple a game i thought or something i'm saying prominently prominently features real time so i don't think that would have counted but if that had been like a permanent new feature of fortnite and a big part of the game yeah yeah yeah yeah okay i mean yeah so there there's room for the over so you're taking the over i'm just saying this is like not are you taking out of the though are you i am i'm gonna i'm gonna take the under because that fortnite thing completely flopped and failed and shut it down.

31:15Darth Vader was instantly became racist. I think we're going to take the under on that. We're all taking the under? I've got to take the under. I just think these are such risk-averse companies. To your point, the one risk taking in this industry, the one risk that was taken in this industry did not materialize in a positive way. I'd love to be wrong, for the record. That would be great if people would start being more AI is more bullish about AI than we are. I hope somebody does do this. I think it'd be awesome. All right. And that wraps the predictions episode. Nice. Good one. Next year. Yeah.

31:53Great. Our next episode, we will be bringing you the biggest hits from the cerebral Valley AI summit, which is on November 12th. We'll be bringing some of our onstage interviews, our favorite ones right here on the newcomer podcast and in your podcast feeds. Thanks, Max and James. go play a song quiz. Go play some volley games on your road food TV or wherever else. We're going to actually show you our real-time AI game at some point and then you will have something interesting to say about our company. Is it out yet? Is it out? We can play a beta right now, so let's set it up. Sounds good. Bye-bye.

32:27See you guys. Thank you for tuning in to this week's episode of the podcast. If you're new here, please like and subscribe. It really helps out the channel. Listen to new episodes every week wherever you get your podcasts.