The recent success of an AI in a global forecasting competition is challenging one of our core beliefs about intelligence: that intuition is a uniquely human trait. As ManticAI’s system outperforms human experts, some in the field are beginning to question whether this elusive quality could emerge in complex machines.
ManticAI placed eighth in the Metaculus Cup, a contest that requires a blend of analytical rigor and what many would call good judgment or intuition. The AI’s high performance suggests it is developing abilities that go beyond simple calculation.
Professional forecaster Ben Shindel, who competed against the AI, is open to the possibility. “Intuition is very important, but I don’t think it’s innately human,” he remarked. This perspective suggests that what we call intuition may be a form of highly advanced, subconscious pattern recognition. If so, it is a skill that sufficiently complex AI models, trained on vast datasets, could plausibly develop.
ManticAI’s system works by deploying a team of AI agents to analyze problems from multiple perspectives, a process that mimics a high-level cognitive deliberation. It games out scenarios and learns from changing information, gradually building a sophisticated “understanding” of a situation that could be seen as a nascent form of machine intuition.
While AI today likely does not “feel” a prediction in the human sense, its ability to produce accurate, non-obvious forecasts suggests it is developing a functional equivalent. As AI continues its rapid evolution, the line between data-driven analysis and what we call intuition may blur, forcing us to redefine what it truly means to have a “gut feeling” about the future.