Find out which horse artificial intelligence thinks will win the Melbourne Cup

Picking a winner at the Melbourne Cup can sometimes be just as much about luck as it is about skill, so how will artificial intelligence fare in picking this year’s race.

While Vauban and Buckaroo are the favourites to win the race that stops a nation, history has shown that favourites are born to be beaten and the field is wide open for almost any result at Flemington this year.

Punters, bookies, trainers, former jockeys and experts have been flooding social media with their tips and they all have wildly different views on who will be Australia’s greatest stayer in 2024.

Some of them claim to have systems or algorithms they have used to pick the finishing order of the Melbourne Cup.

But with so many variables at play, can any of these systems be trusted?

Which is why Financial services company Macquarie has turned to artificial intelligence [AI] to determine the winner of the 2024 Cup.

Bookies will be looking to clean up on Melbourne Cup day, will AI tip the balances back in the punters’ favour?

A leading financial services company correctly picked the winner of the 2023 Melbourne Cup using AI and has run the numbers again

In 2018, OpenAI launched GPT-1, a language model with 117 million parameters, which evolved into the highly advanced ChatGPT by 2020.

With each iteration, these models have become more adept at understanding context, generating human-like responses, and assisting in various applications, marking rapid progress in just a few decades.

So this year, Macquarie have fed all of the data into a variation of ChatGPT called PunterGPT.

Macquarie used data to correctly predict the 2023 winner Without a Fight by using PunterGPT and they have revealed the picks the AI software has generated for the 2024 Melbourne Cup.

‘This year, it isn’t just about proving that last year wasn’t a fluke – it’s about solidifying our place as the dark horse in the race of Melbourne Cup oracles,’ the company posted.

Macquarie’s tips for the Melbourne Cup using traditional data analysis

The company’s AI tips for the big race, with overlapped runners highlighted in green

A packed house has crammed into Flemington for the 2024 Melbourne Cup event

First, Macquarie revealed the horses their traditional system has chosen, with Vauban, Onesmoothoperator and Sea King tipped to make up the top three.

AI might know something we don’t know, though, as the PunterGPT model doesn’t even have race favourite Vauban finishing in the top six. It did, however, agree that Sea King and Onesmoothoperator would finish in the top three with Sea King claiming the Cup.

PunterGPT then predicts that second-favourite Buckaroo would have to settle for fourth, with Absurde in fifth and Japanese raider Okita Soushi in sixth.

If you are looking for a combination of both traditional and AI predictions, the overlapping horses were Sea King, Onesmoothoperator, Absurde and Okita Soushi in the top six.