Anyone who follows Unanimous AI knows we have mountains of evidence that shows Swarm AI really works, enabling networked human groups to generate better decisions and smarter forecasts and more accurate medical diagnoses and better business evaluations. Of course, pointing to academic papers is not as much fun as testing our technology against high-profile events where anything can go wrong. We’ve done this many times, using Swarm AI to predict a wide range of events from the Kentucky Derby and the Super Bowl, to the 2020 election with great success.
Which brings us to the 2023 Academy Awards that will air live this Sunday. For the seventh year in a row, researchers at Unanimous AI have invited a group of randomly selected “movie enthusiasts” to participate online as a real-time Swarm Intelligence and predict all major categories of the Oscars. If things go the way they have in the past, this group of just 20 amateurs will match or outperform most professional movie critics. Again, this is not a vote or a poll – these 20 individuals formed a real-time system mediated by swarm-intelligence algorithms that helped them converge on the best combination of their individual insights and intuitions.
The process of predicting the Oscars took about 30 minutes and was conducted entirely online. It produced the set of results shown in the table below. As you can see, the swarming method outputs not just a prediction for each award but a probabilistic confidence. As listed, the most likely movies to win Oscars include All is Quiet on the Western Front, which is predicted to win Best International Film, and Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio which is predicted to win Best Animated Feature Film. And finally, Everything Everywhere All At Once is predicted to be the big winner on Sunday night overall.
Will all the predictions be correct? If our 2023 results are similar to previous years, we can expect the Artificial Swarm Intelligence to produce a set of forecasts that land between 81% and 93% accurate when the results are announced on Sunday night.
Of course, using artificial swarms to amplify the intelligence of human groups is useful for far more important things than predicting the Oscars. For example, the United Nations has used ASI to help them forecast famines in hot spots around the globe, while other groups are exploring the use of swarms to facilitate negotiations among entrenched parties with adverse interests. And business teams around the globe use Swarm AI to improve forecasts, decisions, and prioritizations by harnessing the wisdom of their teams.
