AI is ready to help you fill out your March Madness bracket
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All the major chatbots were able to fill out an NCAA bracket this year, a sharp contrast from a year ago when AI struggled to decipher who would match up in later rounds.
Why it matters: It's an object lesson for a broader AI reality: What is impossible for AI at one point is often a trivial task just months later.
Zoom in: I gave the bots the same task as a year ago — look at a PDF bracket and make picks for each matchup.
- This year I explicitly encouraged the bots to search the web, check for injuries and explore which teams have a history of a Cinderella run.
- OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude and Google's Gemini all came up with plausible brackets that included a few upset picks, usually with a rationale to justify the choice.
Though they differed on who would win the early rounds, all three picked UConn to win the women's title. On the men's side, Gemini went with Arizona, while ChatGPT and Claude picked Duke.
- Among their upset predictions, Claude sees Akron beating Texas Tech and BYU defeating March Madness powerhouse Gonzaga, noting a key injury. ChatGPT predicted St. John's and VCU to play spoilers, while Gemini picked my alma mater, Miami (Ohio), to beat Tennessee.
- There were some tiny hiccups. For example, Gemini had the wrong potential matchups for the Final Four but was able to correct its picks after a follow-up prompt explaining the error.
This year I entered each bot's picks manually into the bracket challenge at ESPN.com.
- I'm pretty sure at least some of the bots could have entered the brackets themselves, given sufficient time and permissions.
- But I'm hesitant to hand over credentials or agentic powers to my computer.
Zoom out: The last two years of using AI for March Madness reflects my overall experience with AI.
- The most important lesson is to not assume that because the technology can't do something today, it won't be able to in a few months.
- And filling out an entire bracket may not be the best way to use AI, anyway. As my colleague Maxwell Millington points out, why not use the AI to help with research rather than giving it all the fun and glory of making the picks.
- For those so inclined, Yahoo Sports has teamed up with Google's NotebookLM, creating separate notebooks filled with data on the men's and women's tournaments that fans can use to ask all manner of college hoops queries.
Between the lines: Two of the hottest trends in tech are both at play during March Madness: AI and prediction markets.
- In some ways, they are two sides of the same coin, both using conventional wisdom to anticipate what will come next, albeit using different methods.
- The bots, of course, could also check in on the prediction markets, though it wasn't clear to me any of them did so this year, at least according to the "chain-of-thought" explanations that I saw flash by.
- Perplexity, which last year partnered with Polymarket, decided against a similar arrangement this year. Kalshi, a rival prediction market, is offering $1 billion for someone who can do the heretofore impossible — predict a completely perfect bracket.
What we're watching: The big question now is how well the various chatbots' picks will fare.
- I'm entering each of the bots' men's picks into Dan Primack's Axios Pro Rata Bracket Challenge (password: BFD), while the women's selections will compete against readers' picks in the annual Axios AI+ pool. (password: beattherobots).
Go deeper: I talked about AI and March Madness during my appearance Monday on NPR's "Here & Now."
