Billionaire Elon Musk on Monday said his startup xAI’s latest iteration of the Grok chatbot could help college basketball fans pick a perfect bracket once March Madness begins.
xAI rolled out its new chatbot Grok-3, which is powered by artificial intelligence (AI), on Monday night, and during its event the company’s lead researcher, Jimmy Paul, noted, “We can also do something more fun. For example, how about make a prediction about March Madness?”
“This is kind of a fun one where Warren Buffett has a billion bet that if you exactly match the entire winning tree of March Madness, you can win a billion dollars from Warren Buffett,” Musk said in reference to the NCAA Basketball tournament bracket.
“It would be pretty cool if AI could help you win a billion dollars from Buffett. It seems like a pretty good investment,” he added.
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Warren Buffett partnered with Yahoo and Quicken Loans in 2014 to offer a contest in which any contestant who picks a perfect March Madness bracket would win $1 billion. The contest had no winner that year and the jackpot went unclaimed, and the contest has changed in the years since.
Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway revised the challenge so that only company employees are eligible to win the new prize, which is $1 million per year.
The company is yet to announce the details of this year’s contest.
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No one has ever picked a perfect NCAA Tournament bracket despite millions of brackets being submitted on various platforms each year when March Madness begins.
To pick a perfect bracket, the would-be oracle of March Madness would have to correctly pick all 63 games in the tournament – including 32 games in the round of 64, plus 16 games in the round of 32, eight games in the Sweet 16, four games in the Elite Eight, the two Final Four games as well as the national championship game. The so-called First Four games, which allow the winners to advance to the round of 64, are typically disregarded in bracket contests.
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The NCAA analyzed the probability of making perfect picks for the 63 games in the March Madness bracket.
If a bracket picker guesses the outcome of each game, there is a 1 in 9.2 quintillion chance of picking a perfect bracket, per the NCAA. For reference, one quintillion is one billion billions.
The odds are slightly better for a bracket picker who is knowledgeable about college basketball, though they still face long odds of about 1 in 120.2 billion, according to the NCAA.
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