Dan Schwarz

AI:AM LIVE — July 6, 2026 — AI Superforecasters?! FutureSearch, the ACX Moment, and a $160M Safety Grant: Dan Schwarz

A holiday-weekend show with one big guest. Nathan and Prakash opened with a Fourth of July recap and Nathan's preview of his two-week China trip — the World AI Conference in Shanghai, the opening of an AI-safety research hub at Tsinghua, and a plan to live on a 'digital alter ego' running DeepSeek, MiniMax, and Kimi instead of his usual US apps. In the news block, Jeffrey Irving's Resolution AI landed a $160M grant from Coefficient Giving — read on-air as AI-safety funders finally writing checks sized to their stated urgency — and a Roon post arguing 'tool AI' is a losing concept sparked an extended exchange on worthy successors, scalable oversight, and the gap between labs' published model specs and what their models actually refuse, with Prakash pressing the provocation that a genuinely value-aligned AI enforcer would end up looking like a 'paperclipper.' Prakash then live-demoed 'Q,' the show's in-development AI voice cohost (OpenAI realtime API plus per-speaker Deepgram diarization), before the hosts dug into the engineering. Then Dan Schwarz — CEO and co-founder of FutureSearch, former CTO of Metaculus, and builder of Google's internal prediction market — joined four days after Scott Alexander's ACX profile ('The AI Superforecasters Are Here,' Jul 2, 2026) put FutureSearch's forecasting agent on display. On air, Dan traced FutureSearch's three-year arc from a Claude-2-era prototype to beating the superforecaster median on ForecastBench; explained past-casting and the Bench to the Future benchmark (which clocked Claude Fable as the best single-agent forecaster within 24 hours of release); argued the real money in forecasting lies in what frontier labs do with the capability, not in trading; debated whether AI forecasters genuinely reason out-of-distribution; unveiled FutureSearch's 'world model' feature launching that same day; owned a correlated-failure mistake in his own Fable export-ban forecast; and closed urging the industry to slow down enough for safety and policy to catch up. The hosts wrapped by pitching a prediction-market rematch: Nathan and Prakash versus FutureSearch.