QUESTION: So if I read you right, you never anticipated that your computer would also forecast war and geopolitical events. ChatGPT seems to be able to find things and answer questions. But it cannot forecast the future by itself. So what did you do that is even more impressive than ChatGPT?
DW
ANSWER: Being a programmer since my teens, was the key. Being a trader, I had experience in both fields, which enabled me to TEACH my system how to analyze. So Socrates is not going out to the web and collecting what everyone has to say. It is analyzing the data all on its own.
Because I was also a history buff, I saw how civilization rose and fell. There was obviously a cycle to absolutely everything. Since even taking energy, we use to just burn wood, then oils, then whale oil, and then oil. There is a cycle to innovation. Not personally knowing if that will change to something else, I had to construct my system with my experience and then allow it to discover entirely on its own.
I have explained at conferences that we had a client, the Universal Bank of Lebanon, who found a ledger recording the daily prices of their currency back decades. They asked if we could create a model. The data was input and the system forecasted that their country would fall apart in 8 days. I thought something was wrong with the data. They calmly asked – What currency would be best? They saw themselves the crisis coming and in 8 days the civil war began.
The same took place with a Saudi client who was a big shipper. He wanted to know what gold was going to do for Iran was going to start attacking shipping in the Gulf the next day. I asked: Are you telling me a war will start tomorrow? Oh yes, he replied. So by 1998, it was clear that the computer was capable of projecting wars. That is when I stood up in our London WEC in June 1998 and warned that Russia was about to collapse in 30 days. The computer monitors everything and it saw the capital moving out. That became the Long-Term Capital Management collapse with the Russian bond market.
Even when 911 took place precisely on our Pi target, they came to understand how our computer was forecasting such events at a basic level. They began looking for people who bought puts on the airlines a few days before.
So ChatGPT is cool and it will dazzle everyone. I wrote such a program during the early ’80s to teach my computer how to use natural language to communicate. I used my children as the input. The program I wrote was designed to have a conversation. It would retain a database of who you were so if it asked if you had a dog and you said yes, it would ask you its name and remember that. So the next time you came back it would ask you how is your dog. It had so impressed my daughter she would bring all her friends over. I was working with Dragon Systems back then when it was hardware. So the computer would talk verbally to them and they thought it was alive.
We will release a portal where you can ask Socrates questions and it will respond. But this is focused on the economy, not the name of Lady Gaga’s dog. Socrates is totally different from ChatGPT. It actually does the analysis and I taught it natural language so I could simply communicate with it. Today, it writes its own reports on over 1,000 markets and instruments daily.
