AI'ing the World Cup

One long-standing tradition I've had with my close family and friends is running a World Cup pool that I'd create myself using Excel.

It was a chance to make the tournament more fun, but also nerd out on Excel formulas (yes, I like Excel). Case in point, see images of the Excel pool and nested formulas attached.

The biggest pains were creating all the formulas, consolidating everyone's sheets, and collecting all their payments via e-transfers over several days.

The last pool I did was for World Cup 2022. And my, oh, my how the times have changed since then.. just 4 years later.

This year I thought I'd do it using AI and host a live webapp on a live URL I purchased for $2 on GoDaddy. In 2 evenings I created a pretty solid World Cup webapp using Google Antigravity with an incredible UI, admin panel, background analytics, Supabase backend, and yes, Stripe payments integration to collect and manage all the $ no matter where the submitter was from. All they needed was a credit card.

Instead of spending time doing manual Excel file consolidations, writing formulas (which I kinda missed), and manual formatting, I was able to instead use this the time to expand this to more family and friends than ever before (zero manual work now) and ask Antigravity to highlight interesting analyses using all the submissions that were placed.

One example was to analyze all picks and determine each person's expected final rank and points using historic team and game stats. I want to compare this with the actuals at the end of the tournament.

I was even able to create 3 AI-generated picks (each for Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT) to see how they'd compare against each other and our human choices.

A huge surprise here was that all 3 models chose the exact same 3 choices for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd (Spain, Argentina, France) -- this is another rabbit hole to unpack.

I guess the lesson here is that it's never been easier to be more productive (in life and work) than it is today. You can easily 5-10X your output.

If you're ever wondering how to use AI to amplify your abilities, I'd say just start typing. Open up Antigravity or anything you've heard of and just start typing what you'd like to do in the chat box and see where it leads you. You will definitely be surprised.

For me, I still have my money on Portugal this year.