***SEE BELOW FOR CONNECTED MARKET/UPDATE!***
The Predictions:
1) Threads overtakes X in daily users and becomes the leading text-based social network.
2) With Threads ascendant, Bluesky begins to wither as its development team prioritizes building its underlying protocol over growth, community management, and making improvements to the user experience.
3) Google mostly catches up to OpenAI in LLM quality and begins to neutralize GPT's lead.
4) GPT-5 begins training.
5) The quality of search results degrades as Google proves unable to reliably detect AI-generated content.
6) Scaled-up AI-generated sludge outcompetes many digital media companies for advertising and affiliate-link dollars, sparking further waves of job losses and consolidation.
7) The US presidential election is full of synthetic media, and it mostly doesn’t matter.
8) Fragmentation in social media will make it more difficult to understand which narratives are resonating most with voters.
9) Despite endless talk about wanting to eliminate it among politicians, TikTok skates unscathed through another presidential administration.
10) Apple's Vision Pro is successful enough to revive interest in mixed reality and the metaverse.
11) The number of people who say they are in romantic relationships with AI companions will increase sharply.
12) Meta kills off its incomprehensible celebrity-based AI characters.
(See here for a full explanation on his blog, Platformer.)
Resolution Criteria:
If Casey himself does a similar retrospective on his blog at the end of next year, I will use his own judgement resolve to the correct number of accurate predictions. If he does not write a retrospective, or his evaluation is ambiguous, or I seriously disagree with whatever reasoning he uses to decide if a prediction is accurate or not, I will resolve according to my own judgement in the week following the closing date (December 31, 2024). I will be giving a 24hr+ heads up in the comments before resolving as to which paradigm I will use.
Given the subjectivity in some of the predictions and how I might need to use my own judgement when resolving, I will refrain from betting on this market myself.
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