Which of Casey Newton's 2024 predictions will come true? [Multiple Choice]
Resolved
YES
GPT-5 begins training.
Resolved
YES
The quality of search results degrades as Google proves unable to reliably detect AI-generated content.
Resolved
YES
The US presidential election is full of synthetic media, and it mostly doesn’t matter.
Resolved
YES
Fragmentation in social media will make it more difficult to understand which narratives are resonating most with voters.
Resolved
YES
TikTok skates unscathed through another presidential administration.
Resolved
YES
The number of people who say they are in romantic relationships with AI companions will increase sharply.
Resolved
YES
Meta kills off its incomprehensible celebrity-based AI characters.
Resolved
NO
Threads overtakes X in daily users and becomes the leading text-based social network.
Resolved
NO
Bluesky begins to wither as its development team prioritizes building its underlying protocol over growth, community management, and making improvements to the user experience.
Resolved
NO
Google mostly catches up to OpenAI in LLM quality and begins to neutralize GPT's lead.
Resolved
NO
Scaled-up AI-generated sludge outcompetes many digital media companies for advertising and affiliate-link dollars, sparking further waves of job losses and consolidation.
Resolved
NO
Apple's Vision Pro is successful enough to revive interest in mixed reality and the metaverse.

SPONSORED by @BoltonBailey! Huge thanks to Bolton for volunteering both the idea & the seed mana for this market (how generous! 😁)

***

All of the above predictions are quoted verbatim from his newsletter, but I tried to excerpt only the most pertinent information from the paragraph-predictions. See here for a full explanation on his blog, Platformer. (The predictions post is free to read without signing up, but it will ask for your email. You can say no.)

One very important point all bettors need to understand is that the only additional criterion I add on top of Casey's is that the predictions must have verifiably come true by EOY 2024. This does NOT require the prediction content to have occurred in full or in part in 2024; e.g. we may have reliable reporting in January 2024 about GPT-5 being trained in 2023, and that would count as a "come true" for the purposes of both markets. That said, nothing that came true only after January 1st, 2025 counts for fairness/clarity/intelligibility. If you disagree with this rule, please do not bet on this market.

NB: the time of reporting on an event =/= the time the event occurs (or fails to occur).

Given this qualifier, I reserve the right to extend the resolution date (tentatively scheduled for January 3rd, 2025) for any reasonable extent beyond the closing date (firmly at December 31st, 2024). I can't foresee any reason it will need to extend beyond January 31st, 2025 at this juncture, but at the absolute latest I will resolve it by Valentine's Day, 2025 if there are serious ambiguities that need time to consider or research. This outcome is especially likely if Casey fails to post a free 2024 retrospective newsletter.

Given the subjectivity inherent in evaluating some of these questions, I will be betting in neither and any resolution outcomes are up to my sole discretion. (That said, if you have good-faith advice, I'd be happy to hear it, especially about resolving to "probability" because I don't have much experience doing that. )

Something important to note about this market's differences from the numerical one is that any of these items could resolve at any time over the course of the next year.

If I am extremely confident in resolving I will do so immediately and without warning, but if there is significant uncertainty I will poll the comment section below. I may resolve any individual item 24hrs+ after I post the poll--I want to allow for those who aren't on Manifold 24/7 to have a chance to voice their opinion--but also resolve quickly enough so that (hopefully) 99% of bettors are satisfied with my management of this market. As such, I'll put an upper limit of one week after poll posting to make a firm decision as to "Yes" "No" "N/A" "Prob" or "Decision Postponed (Awaiting Further Reporting)". The only situation in which any will resolve "N/A" is if it becomes clear after the fact that something was inherently flawed in the wording/intent/factuality of the prediction and therefore a rational prediction couldn't possibly have been made (or the prediction no longer makes sense for some reason).

If you bet on this market, YOU are responsible for understanding and agreeing to ALL of the resolution criteria linked below and listed above. If you have any general questions about the Platformer 2024 Predictions, please post them in the numerical market so that we can have a centralized location to discuss (any queries specific to this market can, of course, be left in the comments below).

Please click attached to read how I plan to resolve both 2024 Platformer Predictions markets:

Thank you for reading, thank you for betting, and may the odds be ever in your favor!! 🎲🎲

  • Update 2025-01-01 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): - Resolutions for individual predictions may be expressed as percentages to reflect partial fulfillment.

    • In cases of ambiguity, the sponsor @BoltonBailey may have the final say on the resolution.

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@traders @BoltonBailey is trying to resolve the last option and made a poll about it, check out the discussion below and vote in the poll:

(v click here v)

/BoltonBailey/how-should-this-question-about-tikt


(^ click here ^)

I'm not sure that the results of the poll are binding, but it should be informative. This process is mentioned in the market description.

@mods the creator seems inactive here, and this is one of the most-traded closed-but-unresolved markets. Could some kind of mod council be convened to resolve these?

@BoltonBailey I guess the criteria say I am supposed to have final say, I am a bit uncomfortable because I didn't know Ophiuchus was going to decide that and I have some pretty big positions in this market and the other one about the number of markets that are supposed to resolve YES here. All that being said, here are my opinions and holdings:

  • Fragmentation in social media will make it more difficult to understand which narratives are resonating most with voters - I feel this one is a YES, with Bluesky and other social medias getting more popular, even before the election. It's hard to say exactly how much this made it harder to understand narratives, but I feel there was a lot of uncertainty over the election, and this didn't make things any easier. I hold 91 NO

  • TikTok skates unscathed through another presidential administration. Hard to say. At the end of 2024 they were scheduled to be banned, but that is not quite the same as being actively banned. If the idea was to resolve solely based on information from before Jan 1, I might say YES. But then again, Dec 31st was not the day that the Biden administration ended, and the market creator said in a comment they would wait until January was over. It technically did go dark for 14 hours on January 19th. It was quickly reverted, but it's not exactly "unscathed" if you have to shut down briefly. So contrary to the market I would posit that this should resolve NO. I hold 110 NO. (Update, argh rereading the criteria I see there is something explicit about EOY 2024, I feel this is pretty tricky, I'm flip-flopping but this might be a YES)

  • The number of people who say they are in romantic relationships with AI companions will increase sharply. I feel this is a YES, you can find plenty of op-eds to this effect. I hold 78 NO.

  • Scaled-up AI-generated sludge... There is this article: Associated Press to Cut Staff by 8%. But it feels hard to say that this is due to AI sludge. I feel like I don't see anything in the form-factor of a traditional media website which is AI generated. Google has AI response to search queries now, but these responses often include links, so I'm not sure this really hurts media companies. I would go NO. I hold 109 NO.

  • Google mostly catches up to OpenAI in LLM quality and begins to neutralize GPT's lead. I would go NO. I think it did catch up in quality, but didn't neutralize lead - in terms of mindshare I fell like Chat GPT is still the Kleenex of LLMs. Creator said they might go 50%, I disagree with resolving things this way because "and" does not mean "resolve 50% if one condition obtains". I hold 1624 NO

  • Apple's Vision Pro is successful enough to revive interest in mixed reality and the metaverse. I feel this is widely considered a failure, I go NO, I think Roose agrees based on his review. I hold 3291 NO.

Here's a screencap of my holdings in the other market: I mostly tried to profit by arbitrage here.

@BoltonBailey thank you very much for going through that. If only every mod tagger put that much thought into it. I resolved most of them as you described but I'm still a little unclear on TikTok. Anyone else have opinions to present to @BoltonBailey ?

@Eliza I feel like the TikTok one might fall into the weird category because it's not something that "actually happened" in 2024. These are supposed to resolve as soon as the thing happened, so this should have resolved No instantly when TikTok was given an ultimatum? The presidential administration does not line up with the end of the market either.

It should have said through the year. I think it might need to N/A. The market description specifically says we can N/A if something didn't make sense. This item has a timeframe that does not line up with the others AND is phrased in kind of the opposite way. So it still seems like it is up to Bolton's final call, and I can see arguments for Yes, No, N/A, and "do the poll thing from the description"

@Eliza I would prefer not to N/A it, since then it wouldn't be clear what to do with the linked market, but that might also be my bias showing, since I have profits there. I agree that the inconsistency between the close date and the wording "presidential administration" makes the question sort of inconsistent.

Let me set up a poll.

@BoltonBailey I think that is a very appropriate step in line with the market description.

@Eliza Ok the poll has concluded, with YES in the lead. As far as I can tell, it's also in the lead among respondents who don't have a position in the market itself. My final recommendation is to resolve YES.

@BoltonBailey thanks for all the hard work

@creator please resolve

@MachiNi FYI that tag doesn't actually ping anyone. You have to do @Ophiuchus instead.

just resolved half of them! going to need to do some thinking/research before resolving the others over the next day or so, but if anyone has any input on resolution ideas, source links would be much appreciated. also, any objections to letting the tiktok one linger on until the end of the month...? seems like that one needs longer to become resolvable, but if y'all feel otherwise we can do it earlier.

@Ophiuchus Perhaps worth noting that Newton and Roose provide their own review of (some of) their predictions in their most recent Hard Fork episode.

  • Threads overtakes X - "Mixed but I feel good"

  • "Lawless LLM" - "More wrong than right"

  • "Google neutralizes ChatGPT" - Mixed bag, yes on LLM quality, not in terms of lead

  • "White collar unionization" - No

  • "Apple Vision Pro succeeds" - "Mostly wrong"

  • "Musk gets a laptop scandal" - "Nailed it"

@Ophiuchus How did GPT-5 begins training resolve yes?

bought αΉ€1,000 NO

Kevin Roose resolved his own market about this to NO, so perhaps that how this should resolve?

@BoltonBailey i really disagree with that one lol. casey himself said on his own blog it was 50/50 right/wrong, and i might do a percentage here. but given how you sponsored this market, i'll let you have the final say on this one if you confirm "NO" seems like the best resolution according to your understanding hehe :)

@Ophiuchus Well, I've also been trading in the market, so I think it's better left up to you.

Upgraded to plus! Thanks for making so many bets on this market 😊

If you haven't checked in lately, I highly recommend you do soβ€”there are some wildly anti-calibrated positions here based on news reports from the past several months. I said I wouldn't place bets myself… but it's so tempting! Make some easy money by updating your bets, before anyone else does πŸ˜‰

That's kind of hard to resolve to yes or no. There are some layoffs and some AI-generated sludge already, but the criteria are extremely fuzzy.

Isn't AI generated content better than most of the human generated trash SEO optimized sites anyway? I don't see how AI output is a loss.

I thought Altman has already said this has started?

@BTE These are verbatim Casey’s comments predictions, not my own.

For resolution purposes, any of the above 12 only has to occur by EOY 2024 to count, so if it happened in 2023 and only got widely reported on in 2024, that would count.

I'm sure the first part is going to happen, but not the second part. The companies can just adapt and focus on other parts of the market.

According to who? It seems to me that getting user data is getting easier rather than harder, but it's the kind of question a motivated reasoner can reach any conclusion on

@TheBayesian

Simplified Decision Heuristics for the market:

1) Casey’s own evaluation in his 2024 retrospective iff reasonable and evidenced

2) If 1 can’t be used, it goes to my own evaluation based the consensus emergent from multiple sources reported on by multiple credible journalists/institutions

3) If 2 is impossible (no consensus, no credible sources, very low confidence) then I will be polling the comment section and asking for resolution arguments from veteran Folders, weighting the latter with a 90% input and 10% input from the polling section.

My goals are to be as factually accurate, trader-fair, and outcome-neutral to the greatest extent possible, but ultimately traders need to trust I’m not going to pull some ridiculous market manager BS of the kind recently seen in at least one other unrelated market (which shall go unnamed).

If the subjectivity bothers you despite the above clarification and absence of any self-dealing on my part, then perhaps it would be better not to place any bets here.

@Ophiuchus thank you! that works

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