AI replaces Paul the Octopus for 2026 World Cup tips

AFP | Paris

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ChatGPT and Claude are betting on Spain. Le Chat from France's Mistral reckons Les Bleus will clinch it. And China's DeepSeek and Qwen have a fondness for Argentina.

The 2026 World Cup is the first with widely available generative AI chatbots, and fans and researchers alike are turning to the systems in a bid to predict the final victors.

This year's fad for non-human answers recalls Paul the Octopus, the cephalopod who divined winning teams by eating from food containers marked with their flags during the 2010 contest.

With OpenAI's ChatGPT released to the public only on November 30, 2022 -- in the midst of the last World Cup in Qatar -- few outside Silicon Valley had generative AI on their radar during Argentina's ascent to the title.

But institutions from banks to universities are today testing out generative AI systems' football foresight. Bank of America analysts found that their Microsoft CoPilot chatbot favoured Spain equally with France, who were tipped by around 40 percent of fans.

Meanwhile tech news site Tom's Guide asked Google's Gemini, ChatGPT and Perplexity -- with Spain predicted as the winners each time, and France as the second pick in each case.

Another news site, Decrypt, received similar results from western chatbots like ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude -- but found that Chinese competitors DeepSeek and Qwen both tipped Argentina.