Romania, AI, 'n Amor
Above the Fold's Palindromic Edition
Everything is Computer
For the first few years of the AI boom, progress was delineated by the accelerating drum beat of frontier LLM model releases, each more capable and more intelligent than the last. But as broader swathes of society begin to be affected by AI, it’s beginning to feel like progress is taking a different form. Implementation requires buy-in from individuals, corporations, industries, and nations. The growth of solar energy, for example, is no longer bottlenecked by improvements to the solar-cell efficiency at converting light into electrons. It’s limited by mundane things like permitting, manufacturing costs, politics, and the availability of labor.
And so, as models become capable—from a technical perspective—at automating more and more domains of labor, we might begin to see a similar progression in where resources are allocated. And that starts with politics.
In the House version of the “big, beautiful bill” working its way through the reconciliation process, there is a provision to create a moratorium on state laws regulating AI, which has understandably generated pushback.
Manifold thinks it’s quite unlikely that this moratorium will make it through the reconciliation process into law, giving only 10% to what would be a blatant defiance of the Byrd rule.
And indeed, as one branch of the government refuses to punt the issue of AI regulation to the states, another branch of the government punts it to the Catholic Church! JD Vance, in a wide-ranging interview with Ross Douthat of The New York Times, drops that he has read AI-2027, mentions discussing the social effects of AI with the Pope, and had this interesting quote:
One thing I’ll say, we’re here at the Embassy in Rome, and I think that this is one of the most profound and positive things that Pope Leo could do, not just for the church but for the world. The American government is not equipped to provide moral leadership, at least full-scale moral leadership, in the wake of all the changes that are going to come along with A.I. I think the church is.
Vance also brings up the difficulties in pausing AI progress in the midst of an AI race with China, to which one might imagine Douthat could have quoted the title of the new book announced by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies.” Manifold traders think that this book is likely to reach the NYT bestseller list:
Commensurate with this forecast, traders think the book will likely sell around 100k copies in its first year. Perhaps the Vice President will give it a read.
In addition to AI gaining mind share in Washington, companies appear to be diversifying from frontier model development to other areas of the ecosystem. OpenAI spent a staggering $6.5 billion (in pre-IPO funny-money) to acquire famed Apple designer Jony Ive to develop AI products. This merger with “io” comes just hours after Google’s own I/O developer’s conference, where they launched a range of tools and products (including a device of their own) that can interface with AI. Both companies seem to anticipate that replacing junior software engineers will be their first truly killer application, as evidenced by OpenAI’s multi-billion dollar acquisition of Windsurf and Google’s overtures to Cursor as well as their development of Firebase Studio.
Meanwhile, Anthropic appears ready to release Claude 4. After rumors have been swirling around early testing of the model, Manifold traders think it’s likely that the model is released within the next few days.
There’s still some uncertainty on whether the next model will be 3.8 or 4.0…
…but traders don’t seem optimistic that the coming model will top the chatbot leaderboard either way.
In general, the enthusiasm in markets for new frontier models appears to be dampening. Rapid gains in interfaces and peripheral functionalities have perhaps concealed the slowing of gains in frontier intelligence. For example, the market on whether an AI will win a gold medal on the IMO 2025 exam has fallen from ~80% earlier in the year to just above 50%.
And the market on whether a 2025 model will be able to get gold on any IMO exam has commensurately fallen from 85% to 70%:
Romanian Election
Speaking of IMO gold medalists…
In what is beginning to be a trend, another foreign election ended with the left-leaning candidate winning a surprising victory. This time it was Nicusor Dan, the mathematician mayor of Bucharest, with an underdog victory over far-right candidate George Simion, who is now challenging the results, alleging French interference. This might sound humorous (French interference, really?) until we remember that just a few months ago, the Constitutional Court to whom Simion is now appealing annulled the original attempt at an election. In that case, it was the Russians who did in fact seemingly interfere, to support Călin Georgescu. Even after that annulment, when the election was rescheduled, Georgescu was a favorite to win. However, his odds on Manifold cratered after he was detained by the police, charged with anti-constitutional behavior, and barred from running. This seemed like an extreme option from across the pond, especially given the previous annulment, but in the shadow of Ceausescu, it’s not hard to see why the Romanian political order was worried about someone with some concerning tendencies being elected to the highest office.
At the start of that drama, Dan was trading at 4% on Manifold! Slowly and methodically, he fought his way back into the race, and proved Manifold traders to be directionally incorrect on election day. In fact, the election wasn’t even that close, with early exit polls and then the first results leading to some rapid shifts on election night in the market odds.
Some large sums of mana changed hands among the Manifold leaderboard elite in this Romanian election:
Roundup (Amor)
To fulfill the palindrome in the title of this week’s newsletter, I am obligated to discuss one of the more interesting, recurring themes for markets on Manifold: marriage markets.
You’re currently able to bet on the likelihood of a wide range of couples, from Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce…
…to Elon Musk and anyone…
…and even the tragically separated He Jiankui and Cathy Tie. See this thread for details about the now-enforced long-distance relationship between the Canadian genetic screening entrepreneur and the controversial Chinese genetic engineer.
On a slightly happier note, the market on whether anyone who met at last year’s Manifest will be married by the end of this year remains surprisingly high, in case you needed an incentive to get tickets for next month’s conference.
Happy Forecasting!
-Above the Fold
Titled perfectly