Forecasting Ithaca
Brave Odysseus, historically-accurate Odysseus, diffusion model-generated Odysseus
This year’s hottest new film has everything. Christopher Nolan aura-farming with practical effects. A hesitantly swashbuckling Matt Damon. Incitement of culture war discourse that has somehow gotten the left enamored by hours of sword-fighting in a film that flunks the Bechdel test, while the right is trapped, casting a dark and gritty adaptation of a Greek epic as everything wrong with modern decadence.
But of course, the story of the Odyssey all comes back to AI capabilities, when you really think about it. An era of flourishing civilization is threatened after the construction of a massive device (Trojan Horse / GPT 6) that hacks its way into walled infrastructure (Troy / HuggingFace Servers). This leads to an uncertain future with bands of roving sea warriors (Greek galleys / those ASCII boats in the Anthropic J-space video).
So perhaps it’s fitting that Elon Musk, unhappy with Nolan’s version of the film, has promised that Grok will create a full-length film soon to remedy the matter. Traders think there’s about a 1 in 6 chance that this film will be released this year, despite Twitter users fawning over the 3 minute clip that perhaps served as inspiration for this commitment.
It’s not the first time that Musk has promised the ability to generate high-quality films. A market created late last year has never really had faith in Grok’s ability to do such a thing, trading 3-4x lower than Manifold’s highly liquid market on AI film generation by any platform, at the same time horizon.
There are reasons to be skeptical here apart from Musk’s history of less-than-realistic timelines. AI video generation capabilities are rapidly improving, but they are not a focus of top labs, and even if they were, it’s doubtful that labs would be aiming first at a use case in generating feature-length films, rather than short clips for corporate marketing and personalized advertisements. And 6 months is fairly rapid to get from where we stand now to Hollywood quality.
There are also reasons to be optimistic. Grok’s video generation is legitimately close to the state of the art. A big chunk of the ~$14 billion vertical microdrama industry is now end-to-end AI generated with scant a human in the loop, and these are already hour-long films, despite being quite sloppy and requiring some degree of human curation and direction.
Regardless of whether it ends up being made, Manifold is fairly skeptical that they’ll find this new AI-generated version more enjoyable than Nolan’s:
In particular, audiences already may be disquieted by the prospect of AI use in film. Traders think it more likely than not that there will be backlash to AI use in a well-received film this year. This would plausibly happen in the run-up to awards season later this year, if it occurs.
In any case, audiences are paying this drama no mind. I celebrated the release of The Odyssey in the traditional way of DC natives: by roasting pork on an open flame in Rock Creek Park and brewing kykeon, a disgusting barley-honey-wine concoction that was used to initiate the ancients into mystery cults at Eleusis. Most viewers just reveled in the wonders of 70mm IMAX and ate popcorn and drank coca-cola, I’d wager. And then they logged onto Rotten Tomatoes to boost the audience score. Unsurprisingly, the Odyssey is now the early favorite to win best picture. Its competition are months behind, with most unreleased to the general public!
The current record for Oscars nominations is 16, held by last year’s Sinners. The Odyssey might come close, or even tie/beat it, if it manages to swing a couple of longer odds supporting actor nominees (remember, the nominations for a lot of categories are often highly correlated due to overlapping voters and vibes).
Ancient Greece Roundup
Traders still think there’s ~30% chance of Linear A being deciphered over the next 3.5 years. The decipherment of Linear B unlocked the palace records of the Myceneans, contemporary with the Trojan war. Linear A would give us epigraphic information and short records from several hundred years earlier. This was the script of the Minoans, though it’s still unknown what language family their tongue would belong to. It’s safe to assume that with many markets on breakthroughs, this market seems correlated with AI capabilities.
Andy Burnham’s accession to the prime minister position raises the odds of the Elgin Marbles being repatriated to Greece by 2030.
And finally, despite this class of objects originating on the other side of the historic Mediterranean, and despite them being found nearly a millennium after Homer, and despite this market only having three traders, I urge you to bet on the purpose of the Roman dodecahedron. If prediction markets can’t figure it out, no one can.
Happy Forecasting!
-Above the Fold