Peter Mühlbacher

Peter Mühlbacher, Nikos I. Bosse, Lawrence Phillips

We present initial results of a forthcoming benchmark for evaluating LLM agents on white-collar tasks of economic value. We evaluate agents on real-world "messy" open-web research tasks of the type that are routine in finance and consulting. In doing so, we lay the groundwork for an LLM agent evaluation suite where good performance directly corresponds to a large economic and societal impact. We built and tested several agent architectures with o1-preview, GPT-4o, Claude-3.5 Sonnet, Llama 3.1 (405b), and GPT-4o-mini. On average, LLM agents powered by Claude-3.5 Sonnet and o1-preview substantially outperformed agents using GPT-4o, with agents based on Llama 3.1 (405b) and GPT-4o-mini lagging noticeably behind. Across LLMs, a ReAct architecture with the ability to delegate subtasks to subagents performed best. In addition to quantitative evaluations, we qualitatively assessed the performance of the LLM agents by inspecting their traces and reflecting on their observations. Our evaluation represents the first in-depth assessment of agents' abilities to conduct challenging, economically valuable analyst-style research on the real open web.

Nikos I. Bosse, Peter Mühlbacher, Jack Wildman et al.

Forecasting future events is highly valuable in decision-making and is a robust measure of general intelligence. As forecasting is probabilistic, developing and evaluating AI forecasters requires generating large numbers of diverse and difficult questions, and accurately resolving them. Previous efforts to automate this laborious work relied on recurring data sources (e.g., weather, stocks), limiting diversity and utility. In this work, we present a system for generating and resolving high-quality forecasting questions automatically and at scale using LLM-powered web research agents. We use this system to generate 1499 diverse, real-world forecasting questions, and to resolve them several months later. We estimate that our system produces verifiable, unambiguous questions approximately 96% of the time, exceeding the rate of Metaculus, a leading human-curated forecasting platform. We also find that our system resolves questions at approximately 95% accuracy. We verify that forecasting agents powered by more intelligent LLMs perform better on these questions (Brier score of 0.134 for Gemini 3 Pro, 0.149 for GPT-5, and 0.179 for Gemini 2.5 Flash). Finally, we demonstrate how our system can be leveraged to directly improve forecasting, by evaluating a question decomposition strategy on a generated question set, yielding a significant improvement in Brier scores (0.132 vs. 0.141).

FutureSearch, Nikos I. Bosse, Jon Evans et al.

Amongst the most common use cases of modern AI is LLM chat with web search enabled. However, no direct evaluations of the quality of web research agents exist that control for the continually-changing web. We introduce Deep Research Bench, consisting of 89 multi-step web research task instances of varying difficulty across 8 diverse task categories, with the answers carefully worked out by skilled humans. We provide a "RetroSearch" environment with a large frozen set of scraped web pages, and demonstrate that offline "RetroSearch" agents perform comparably to "live web" agents, enabling reliable evaluations of models over time. We provide robust agent tooling and scaffolding to benchmark major LLMs as they are released, including "thinking" models like o3 and Gemini 2.5 Pro. We include automated evaluations of the lengthy agent traces to report progress over time in hallucinations, tool use, and forgetting. Finally, we evaluate the major web research products branded as "Deep Research", "Deep Search", "Search", or "Research." Results are available on a public leaderboard at https://drb.futuresearch.ai/.

FutureSearch, Jack Wildman, Nikos I. Bosse et al.

Forecasting is a challenging task that offers a clearly measurable way to study AI systems. Forecasting requires a large amount of research on the internet, and evaluations require time for events to happen, making the development of forecasting benchmarks challenging. To date, no forecasting benchmark provides a realistic, hermetic, and repeatable environment for LLM forecasters. We introduce Bench To the Future (BTF), a "pastcasting" benchmark with hundreds of high-quality questions for which the resolution is already known. Each question is accompanied by a large offline corpus of tens of thousands of relevant web pages, enabling a way to elicit realistic "forecasts" on past events from LLMs. Results suggest that our pastcasting environment can produce results comparable to those based on forecasts using the internet on at-the-time unresolved questions. We show results benchmarking agent and chain-of-thought forecasting approaches using several LLMs, including the recently-released Claude 4 models, and demonstrate BTF's ability to track steady forecasting capability progress over time. We intend this to be a living benchmark, with new questions added continually to account for increasing training data cutoff dates. We invite researchers to contact us at hello@futuresearch.ai to utilize our benchmark or tooling for their own research.