Nate Silver
Statistician and political analyst who founded FiveThirtyEight and served as its editor-in-chief until May 2023.
“I get to hire two world-class programmers, coders, for whatever I pay for the max plans, $100, $200 a month. … We have an NFL model. The NFL has all these complex playoff tiebreakers. … Last year when I built our model, it took me two and a half days to code them up. And some of the code was buggy. … Now you have GPT or Claude do it and they do it in 15 minutes while you're at the gym. … Now, again, there are dangers. They can introduce bugs and kind of hide them from you.”
Odd Lots · Money & Markets · November 2026
Context
Asked whether AI has made it easier for him to build models, Silver says yes and uses his NFL playoff-tiebreaker code as the example, while warning that the models can slip in bugs without telling you.
Transcript
…the, you know, the whales, right? Not like the French whale from 2024, but like whales, like degenerate rich guys with a lot of money to burn, right? Extreme. Whereas they're maybe less likely to invest in individual races, but there's really not that, there's really not that much of a gap, right?
…are people who are going to be voting in this election that were like born during the Obama administration. Some of these things freak me out a little bit. Can you talk objectively about like, is it unambiguous in your mind that AI has made it easier for you to build models and to do your job?
Yeah, for sure. Look, I get to hire two world-class programmers, coders, for whatever I pay for the max plans, right? $100, $200 a month. So I have these complex projects that you definitely couldn't one shot or even come close to it. But I know this really well and I've coded these things myself. And I know when you feed GPT or Claude a 10,000 word program and say, carefully audit this, it's quite sharp about it. Now, I would still say on like two-thirds of prompts, I have to provide quite a bit of guidance, right? It's not like, oh, cool, man, next step, right? But like, it's great. It's a great teammate. You know, to take something a more obscure example. So we have an NFL model. The NFL has all these complex playoff tiebreakers, right? They're purely algorithmic. And last year when I built our model, it took me two and a half days to code them up. And like some of the code was buggy. We skipped a couple of tie records. It was very slow, right? You know, now you have GPT or Claude do it and they do it in 15 minutes while you're at the gym, right? And it's code is 10 times faster. Now, again, there are dangers. Like they can introduce bugs and kind of hide them from you. We built a soccer model too. And like in one version. Soccer model, it had the…
FIFA World Cup model did have Spain versus Argentina in the world. We had a really good desktop. Yeah. That's the thing about, and we
have NFL. So NFL, you know, you have good weeks and bad weeks. And like, that's why, you know, maybe if Republicans win the house with a sanity, we'd say, well, 25% things happen, right? It would be great. But like, if they win the house, maybe we'll just make Silver Bulls and AI in a sports blog.…
like give up. Just give up. Nate Silver, thank you so much for joining us on our Election Day Special and chat. Thank you, Joe. That was a fun conversation, Tracy. I think my favorite part of the conversation was Nate preemptively parodying how he will sound if Abdul Al Saeed slightly…
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