- The Melbourne Cup is one of the most difficult races to choose
- The best Stayers in the world will fight in Flemington
- Can AI help you choose a winning bet in 2024?
Picking a winner in the Melbourne Cup can sometimes depend on both luck and skill, so how will artificial intelligence fare when it comes to picking this year’s race?
While Vauban and Buckaroo are the favorites to win the race that stops a nation, history has shown that favorites are born to be beaten and the field is open for almost any result at Flemington this year.
Punters, bookmakers, trainers, former jockeys and experts have been flooding social media with their advice and they all have very different views on who will be Australia’s best permanent in 2024.
Some of them claim to have systems or algorithms that they have used to choose the finishing order of the Melbourne Cup.
But with so many variables at play, can any of these systems be trusted?
That’s why financial services company Macquarie has turned to artificial intelligence (AI) to determine the winner of the 2024 Cup.
Bookmakers will look to clean up on Melbourne Cup day, will AI tip the scales in punters’ favour?
A leading financial services company correctly picked the 2023 Melbourne Cup winner using AI and has done the numbers again
In 2018, OpenAI released GPT-1, a language model with 117 million parameters, which evolved into the highly advanced ChatGPT in 2020.
With each iteration, these models have become more adept at understanding context, generating human-like responses, and assisting in various applications, marking rapid progress in just a few decades.
So this year, Macquarie pulled all the data into a variation of ChatGPT called PunterGPT.
Macquarie used data to correctly predict the winner of 2023 Sin Lucha using PunterGPT and revealed the selections the AI software generated for the 2024 Melbourne Cup.
“This year, it’s not just about proving that last year was no fluke, but solidifying our place as the dark horse in the Melbourne Cup Oracle race,” the company posted.
Macquarie’s Melbourne Cup tips using traditional data analysis
The company’s AI tips for the big race, with overlapping runners highlighted in green
A packed house has packed into Flemington for the 2024 Melbourne Cup event
First, Macquarie revealed the horses its traditional system has chosen, with Vauban, Onesmoothoperator and Sea King among the top three.
However, the AI might know something we don’t, as the PunterGPT model doesn’t even have race favorite Vauban finishing in the top six. However, it was agreed that Sea King and Onesmoothoperator would finish in the top three and Sea King would take the Cup.
PunterGPT then predicts that second seed Buckaroo would have to settle for fourth place, with Absurde in fifth and Japanese raider Okita Soushi in sixth.
If you’re looking for a mix of traditional and AI predictions, the overlapping horses were Sea King, Onesmoothoperator, Absurde, and Okita Soushi in the top six.
