Burabay, a popular lake resort in northern Kazakhstan, has hosted the 10th edition of the ‘Voices of Friends: Poetry & Art’ festival, which ran from 29 November to 2 December.
The annual gathering, arranged by the London-based Eurasian Creative Guild (ECG), has become one of Central Asia’s events for cultural collaboration, bringing together writers, filmmakers, visual artists and musicians from 20 countries.
This year’s programme continued the festival’s mix of literature and modern arts, with an emphasis for 2025 on emerging film talent, through the youth-focused Cinema Future festival and the Burabay International Short Film Festival (BISFF).
According to filmmaker and BISFF jury member Timur Akhmedjanov, “Young filmmakers from different countries on one screen [means] the birth of a new generation of cinema.”
Alongside film events, the festival featured book presentations from publishers Hertfordshire Press, discussions about art, performances by an international community choir, and creative workshops hosted at the ECG Horizons residency.
Organisers emphasised that for the festival, collaboration is as important as presentation. “The festival grows like a living universe of ideas and emotions. Here everyone is a creator – and everyone feels that their voice matters,” said festival director and cultural projects author Taina Kaunis.
During the event’s closing ceremony, awards were presented to some figures shaping Eurasian culture, while the Eurasian Creative Guild announced a change in leadership ahead of its 2026 season.
Founder Marat Akhmedjanov, originally from Uzbekistan but now residing in Scotland, highlighted the organisation’s international ethos, saying: “Creativity knows no borders. We speak dozens of languages, yet understand each other perfectly.” ECG vice-chair Saltanat Khamzeyeva called it “the beginning of a big story” for cultural development in Central Asia.
The Guild underscores that the Burabay resort has become more than a picturesque location for a festival. Chair Francesca Mepham summed up its growing impact: “We see Eurasian creativity becoming a global voice – and this voice will only become stronger.”
He previously served 17 years in prison after being convicted of felony possession with the intent to distribute methamphetamine and possession of a gun in a drug trafficking crime.
Owner of Sports Direct chain says consumer confidence ‘very subdued’ with sales at sports division down 5.8%
The owner of Sports Direct and Flannels has said sales have fallen at its UK retail businesses amid heavy discounting by rivals and “very subdued” consumer confidence.
Frasers, which is controlled by former Newcastle United owner Mike Ashley, said sales at its UK sports division were down 5.8% in the six months to 26 October to £1.3bn despite growth at the main Sports Direct chain because of “planned decline” at its Game outlets and the Studio Retail online arm.
RMFG has raised $4.5 million in pre-seed funding to bolster US manufacturing with AI.
Its 32-year-old founder taught himself to code while working in gas station maintenance.
RMFG wants to jump in on the white-hot robotics industry.
AI-powered manufacturing startup RMFG has raised $4.5 million to help revive US production.
RMFG was launched in July 2024 by Kenneth Cassel, a 32-year-old college dropout and Y Combinator graduate, as well as a father of four. Cassel grew up in a large, blue-collar family in Texas and taught himself to code while working maintenance at a gas station company.
RMFG says it helps startups that don’t want to deal with the costs of building their own facilities or face the security risks of going overseas.
Its AI-powered sheet metal factory, located in Dallas-Fort Worth, handles work that is usually done manually, using AI agents and other technologies to handle quoting, automate quality control, and tweak designs. This cuts lead times from months to weeks, the company said.
In the past, factory jobs lacked status, Cassel said, though technology has transformed the industry, and more people are interested in physical products “because they’re seeing AI capabilities erode the value of pure software startups,” he said.
RMFG is jumping in on the white-hot robotics industry, where most of its clients operate.
“These companies have raised venture capital, they’re scaling, they’re trying to build out really quickly,” Cassel said. “Ultimately, I think it’s going to be larger than automotive.”
Y Combinator, Day One Ventures, and Soma Capital participated in RMFG’s pre-seed round, along with angel investors Balaji Srinivasan, Patrick Collison, Charlie Songhurst, and Joshua Browder.
RMFG says it has shipped more than 100,000 parts in the last year and has about 200 customers, including drill-rig startup Durin, cloud-seeding company Rainmaker, and robotic fulfillment startup Nimble. It offers laser-cut sheet metal parts and plans to expand into additional services, Cassel said.
RMFG has nine employees — mostly in manufacturing. Cassel said the startup will primarily use funds to grow its technology team, which consists of himself and a founding engineer.
Here’s a look at the pitch deck RMFG used to raise its $4.5 million pre-seed. Slides have been redacted so that the deck can be shared publicly.
An answer to this fascinating question emerged recently when economist David Seif wrapped up an annual forecasting contest he runs for a secret group of economists, hedge fund investors, and tech executives.
In its seventh year, the challenge requires contestants to predict roughly 30 events. The 2025 game kicked off in late 2024, when Seif sent out the list of events to predict in fields such as politics, business, science, economics, pop culture, and sports.
One question asked the contestants to forecast whether Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce would announce their engagement by April 1. Another: Would Bulgaria adopt the euro as its official currency on or before July 1?
Sam Leffell, a director at a hedge fund firm, was filling out his probabilities in December and had an idea.
“When I was answering the questions, I had the ChatGPT screen up. I wondered, what it will say to these questions?” he recalled in a recent interview.
ChatGPT had to learn complex rules
Leffell reached out to Seif to ask if ChatGPT could take part, and Seif said, go for it. So, Leffell got started by pasting the game’s rules into ChatGPT.
These are complex rules, covering multiple pages. Contestants must assign a percentage based on the likelihood of each event happening. As the results come in over the year, these predictions are scored a bit like golf. The lowest score wins.
“You get points equal to the square of the difference between what you put and the results,” Seif said.
For example, if you assign a 90% chance of something happening and you get it right, you get 10 points. That number is squared, resulting in a total of 100 points. Excellent work.
The opposite is more painful. If your 90% probability event doesn’t occur, you are stuck with the difference between 90 and zero. That 90 score is then squared for a total of 8,100 points. Ouch.
And this is only the scoring system. There are whole pages of rules on other aspects of the game. Leffell pasted all this into ChatGPT.
A few seconds later, the AI chatbot responded, “Thank you for providing the detailed rules of the forecasting contest. Please share the clean list of prompts for which you need a probability estimate, and I will provide a single number for each as per the contest’s guidelines.”
Leffell pasted in all 30 questions at once, and ChatGPT quickly replied with its percentage probabilities for each event. Leffell sent those to Seif, who entered the responses on ChatGPT’s behalf.
Even while setting this machine-prediction experiment up, Leffell noticed something intriguing.
“For one question, related to an NFL wild card outcome, it gave a mathematical response that was statistically correct,” he said. “It was doing math rather than qualitative stuff. That was notable because ChatGPT, at the time, was not supposed to be good at math.”
ChatGPT makes predictions
As 2025 began, 160 contestants had submitted their predictions and began waiting for the future to unfurl.
This is when I first heard about the game through friends of mine who were participating. One is a hedge fund manager. The other two are a chief marketing officer and a lawyer.
They became insufferable at parties, discussing their various forecasts, along with the intricacies of the scoring system and other rules.
It’s the type of conversation that bores me to death. However, when one friend mentioned that ChatGPT was taking part for the first time, I got hooked.
Could a machine outperform 160 humans in predicting all these events? AI models are great when there’s existing data. When the future’s involved, there’s a lot less information to lean on.
I’d recently tested ChatGPT’s stock market forecasting ability. Could it excel at this more complex challenge, or are humans uniquely adept at foreseeing the future through experience, extrapolation, and intuition?
As the year progressed, some events occurred, and others didn’t. Some happened too late, while others developed in weird, unexpected ways. As life does.
Each time a question was resolved, Seif updated a central spreadsheet and sent a ranking to all the contestants.
My friends seized on every update. Who was winning? Who was lagging? And most of all, where was ChatGPT ranked?
Strange symmetry
The game wrapped up on November 13.
“For the first time in the seven years we’ve run the contest, I pulled off the win myself,” Seif wrote in his final email update of the 2025 competition.
ChatGPT came 80th, he wrote, “and we had 160 players.”
Strange symmetry. I immediately texted my friends: This means ChatGPT is no better than the average human! Not very impressive.
One of my buddies, the CMO, replied: No, this means ChatGPT is as good as the average human. Incredible!
ChatGPT missed a benchmark
I asked Seif about this, and he had a different way of measuring ChatGPT’s predictive power, or lack thereof.
If you’d put a 50% probability for each event happening, you’d have gotten 75,000 points. That’s Seif’s benchmark for whether contestants added value or not.
ChatGPT got 82,925. So it missed that benchmark, essentially adding negative value, according to Seif.
When there was a lot of existing data to help with forecasting and calculating probabilities, ChatGPT did better, he said.
For instance, the chatbot analyzed this event well, giving it a 70% chance of happening: The winning team of the FIFA Club World Cup is from the European Union.
ChatGPT performed worse when there was a lack of data, or it missed new information that altered the likelihood of an event occurring.
For example, the chatbot assigned a 95% chance of this happening: Astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore safely return to Earth by March 1.
By the end of 2024, news announcements made it clear that this rescue mission was highly unlikely to happen by March 1, 2025, Seif said.
“ChatGPT just wasn’t up with the news on that one,” he added.
Maybe ChatGPT won?
Leffell, the hedge fund manager who entered ChatGPT in the game, drew different conclusions and shared some important caveats.
He asked ChatGPT to make these predictions in December 2024. OpenAI’s chatbot has improved since then, so its forecasting ability may be better now. Better prompting may have also helped ChatGPT perform better.
Leffell also said that ChatGPT took only a few minutes to understand the complex rules of the game and make 30 predictions—a lot faster than most human contestants.
Leffell himself spent many hours, over several days, to understand the questions and research the events, coming up with his own probabilities.
“It did better than half the people, and it spent a lot less time than everyone else on the challenge,” he told me. “If you look at results per minute of work, maybe ChatGPT won?”
As an investor, he’s in the business of assessing as many probabilities as possible, so ChatGPT and similar AI tools have become essential, he said.
“What if you are not having to predict 30 events quickly, but 30,000 events instead? What if it’s good enough at making all these predictions quickly?” Leffell said.
“It’s become ubiquitous in everything I do, in my personal life and at work,” he added. “We’re using it a lot. ChatGPT is table stakes at this point.”
