At Unanimous, we don’t replace people with AI, we connect groups together into super-intelligent systems. One of our favorite things to do is using our technologies to turn large groups of regular citizens into an “artificial expert” that can outperform the professionals on everything from predicting the Oscars and the World Cup, to excelling on IQ tests. And then there’s the time when a CBS reporter challenged us to predict the first four horses of the Kentucky Derby in order – turning the reporter’s $20 betting ticket into $11,000.
Yesterday took aim at the latest high-profile sporting event: the fight between Mike Tyson and Jake Paul that will air exclusively on Netflix on Friday night. Considering this is not a title fight and that Mike Tyson retired from boxing two decades ago, we had to ask:
Is this really a sporting event that many millions of people will watch?
Our prediction is an BIG YES. In fact, we believe this fight is likely to be the highest viewership sporting event on streaming ever, with over 25M fans watching live on Netflix this Friday. For context, the last Superbowl (on network TV) drew 124M viewers.
To make this prediction, we gathered 107 casual sports fans (randomly selected) in our Thinkscape platform and had them deliberate conversationally as a real-time “collective superintelligence” that can generate far deeper insights than traditional polls, surveys, interviews, or focus groups. The first thing we asked them was: “Based on the people you know (friends, family, coworkers, etc.) will the Mike Tyson vs Jake Paul fight really be one of the most watched boxing matches in recent history and why?”
After they debated the issue, we had the participants use our unique graphical Swarm feature inside Thinkscape to converge on a probabilistic prediction as to whether more than 25M viewers would watch the event live on Netflix, a milestone that would make it the most watched sporting event on a streaming platform ever.
The following video was generated using the output from Thinkscape. It gives the core reasons why this group of 100 sports fans believes that this event will have record-breaking viewership and shows the graphical swarm converging on a probabilistic forecast:
UPDATE / 11.16.24:
By Unanimous Decision: According to the promoters, the event drew over 100M viewers, making it the most watched streaming event ever by over 4X. In fact, the viewership was so much higher than even Netflix expected, it crashed their servers and froze for hundreds of thousands of viewers around the US. And of course, the boxing itself between Tyson and Paul was panned by just about everyone, called farcical by the BBC . Only the undercard woman’s title fight saved the day.
For more info on Thinkscape and its remarkable power to harness and amplify group intelligence, visit: https://www.thinkscape.ai/
