Some up-and-comers are pushing to make agents that can actually place wagers instead of just supplying tips, but the field is off to a rough start. Tom Fleetham formerly worked as the head of business development for a blockchain platform called Zilliqa that experimented with an AI gambling agent called Ava, focused on picking horse race winners. \u201cShe had good analysis, good results,\u201d he says. \u201cWhere it got hard was actually trying to place the bets.\u201d<\/p>\n
The company couldn\u2019t get Ava to reliably place bets using crypto wallets in a timely fashion, Fleethem claims. \u201cIt took forever,\u201d Fleetham says. \u201cWe gave up.\u201d<\/p>\n
YouTube is awash in tutorials about how to create and manage gambling agents that can place bets on behalf of humans. But again, these services do not appear to be minting new millionaires\u2014or even thousandaires. Siraj Raval, a YouTuber who publishes videos about how to make money using AI, has promoted a side project called WagerGPT on his channel. He claims the tool is capable of placing bets, and he charges people $199 a month for access. \u201cAs of eight months ago, I implemented a feature to let WagerGPT place bets. Now it’s doing that for the users full-time,\u201d Raval claims. According to Raval, WagerGPT scans over 40 sports books and \u201cspots all sorts of variables that humans can\u2019t.\u201d Ravel invited WIRED to join a Telegram group he claimed was full of people using WagerGPT, but the channel was largely inactive, and most of the recent messages were questions about what\u2019s going on with the service. \u201cIt\u2019s completely dead,\u201d alleges Pete Sanchez, one of the participants. \u201cWaste of money.\u201d<\/p>\n
As AI agents cannot control traditional bank accounts, most of the fully automated betting products focus on sports gambling websites and prediction markets that take cryptocurrency, as many agents can and do operate crypto wallets. One of the largest mainstream projects to allow AI agents to make all sorts of transactions on behalf of humans is Coinbase\u2019s AgentKit. It imagines a world in which agents can execute a number of financial transactions, from purchasing airline tickets to trading crypto and, yes, placing bets on sports. Lincoln Murr, an AI product manager at Coinbase, says that a lot of AgentKit\u2019s early use cases \u201cwere speculative in nature\u201d and noted he hadn\u2019t seen anything particularly successful. \u201cHow profitable these agents truly are, I don\u2019t know,\u201d he says. The one he\u2019s been paying the most attention to is called Sire. The project describes itself as \u201can agentic sports-betting hedge fund\u201d and operates as a DAO. (In crypto terms, DAO means decentralized autonomous organization\u2014a member-owned community that uses blockchain-based contracts). \u201cThose types of things are the direction we\u2019re heading,\u201d Murr says.<\/p>\n
Sire (which was previously called DraiftKing, but had to rebrand for legal reasons) is in the process of a relaunch. Max Sebti, the CEO of its parent company, Score, says the company uses a combination of public and private data as well as \u201ccomputer vision tech that is watching the games\u201d to get the most up-to-date information possible in order to determine winning bets. Score\u2019s business model is a complicated mashup of crypto and gambling. Eventually, the company plans to allow anyone to transfer USD into a wallet, which will then be converted into a stablecoin. After that, the plan is that Sire\u2019s AI agents will pool the money with payments from other customers and place bets on decentralized sports books and prediction markets that accept crypto, including Polymarket. Then, Sebti says, the gents will redistribute the winnings back to the community. Septi describes the initiative as \u201ca very steady, hedge-fund like product.\u201d Anyone can add money to a wallet, but to take winnings out, there\u2019s a \u201cperformance fee\u201d that must be paid to Sire\u2014one that can be reduced if the customer purchases the company\u2019s crypto token. The service comes out of beta this month.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Some up-and-comers are pushing to make agents that can actually place wagers instead of just supplying tips, but…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":391735,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3163],"tags":[323,1942,33025,8441,43042,2259,6732,53,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-391734","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-automation","11":"tag-chatbots","12":"tag-coinbase","13":"tag-crypto","14":"tag-gambling","15":"tag-technology","16":"tag-uk","17":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115134396020960955","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/391734","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=391734"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/391734\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/391735"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=391734"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=391734"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=391734"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}