At Unanimous AI, we don’t replace people with AI, we connect human groups together into super-intelligent systems. It’s an annual tradition to use our technologies to predict high-profile events of public interest, often at the request of journalists who want to test our forecasting abilities. This started back in 2016 when a CBS reporter challenged us to predict the Kentucky Derby, not just the winner but the first four horses in order. We did it, beating 540-1 odds and worldwide headlines: Newsweek Article 2016

The prediction above was not made by using AI on a massive dataset about horse racing, but by using AI to connect a group of racing fans in real-time and have them function together as a Collective Superintelligence. Of course our technology has advanced since 2016. Our latest platform is called Thinkscape and it enables large groups (up to 400 people) to hold real-time deliberative conversations and converge on optimized solutions. And because it’s conversational, Thinkscape outputs detailed qualitative reasons why the system supports that outcome.

This makes Thinkscape a remarkable tool for harnessing the intelligence of large groups, enabling teams up to 400 people to brainstorm and deliberate in real-time and converge on deep insights. It’s also a remarkable tool for market researchers who want to quickly capture qualitative input at large scale (i.e. qualitative insights at statistical scale!).

Enough background… what about the World Series? 

The seven game series (Dodgers vs Yankees) gets underway this evening, with the first pitch of the Fall Classic in Los Angeles. This is one of baseball’s oldest and most-storied rivalries but instead of DiMaggio versus the Duke, 2024 brings us a must-see matchup between Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani. Many baseball pundits see this as one of the most evenly matched World Series in years, making predicting the outcome a great opportunity for Unanimous AI to showcase Conversational Swarm Intelligence (CSI) – a new way for large groups (up to 400 people) to hold real-time conversations and significantly amplify their collective intelligence.

Using Unanimous’ revolutionary platform Thinkscape, a group of 64 Major League Baseball fans joined together to discuss which team would win the World Series – and most importantly – why? Thinkscape facilitates Conversational Swarm Intelligence by dividing this large group of 64 baseball fans into smaller individual “ThinkTanks” of 5-6 people each, where conversation is most productive. Inside each ThinkTank, these small groups are able to carry on a discussion, with an AI agent then “sharing” their ideas and assertions to other ThinkTanks to consider. Here’s what that looked like from a top-level view.

Each circle shown above is a ThinkTank, and the red-outlined ThinkTanks represent groups making assertions that mostly supported the Yankees winning the Series. The ThinkTanks outlined in Dodger Blue, meanwhile, supported Los Angeles. As this replay of the actual session shows, the sharing of ideas allows this large group to carry on a discussion together and influence one another, while avoiding the pitfalls that make an actual in-person conversation among 50 people impossible to have.

In the end, our AI-powered collective intelligence predicted that the Dodgers will win the World Series in 2024. And using Thinkscape is a great way to find out why this outcome is the most likely result.  The platform automatically output a detailed analysis and generated the video below in which an AI agent explains why the dodgers will win this year:

And while Thinkscape is great for the mix of qualitative and quantitative analysis presented by this initial question of “Which team will win the World Series and why?”, Unanimous AI’s classic Swarm platform remains a great way to tap into Swarm Intelligence to get insights on questions that may have fixed answers. And now Swarm integrates seamlessly into the Thinkscape environment, allowing the combination of both powerful human-powered AI platforms working together.

Thus, after extensive discussion to determine which club would win the World Series, Swarm was used for the group of baseball fans to predict how many games they expected the Series to last. As you can see, they don’t foresee anything like a series sweep here.

The group was also asked to assess how confident it was in their pick of the Dodgers winning the Championship. Fair to say that while the group thinks the Dodgers will win, they see this being a very close World Series.

Will Unanimous AI be correct in predicting the World Series for the fifth year in a row?  We will know next week.

(UPDATE – we were correct again… the Dodgers won in 5 games!) 

For more information about Thinkscape and its remarkable power to harness group intelligence, visit: https://www.thinkscape.ai/