The Centaur model goes beyond single tasks and predicts a wide array of human behaviour.

An innovative artificial-intelligence (AI) system can predict the decisions people will make in a wide variety of situations — often outperforming classical theories used in psychology to describe human choices.

The researchers who developed the system, called Centaur, fine-tuned a large language model (LLM) using a massive set of data from 160 psychology experiments, in which 60,000 people made more than 10 million choices across many tasks.

Most computer models and cognitive theories stick to a single task. For instance, Google Deepmind’s AlphaGo can only play the strategy game Go, and prospect theory can only predict how a person will choose between potential losses and gains. Centaur, by contrast, can simulate human behaviour across a spectrum of tasks — including gambling, memory games and problem-solving. During testing, it was even able to predict people’s choices in tasks it had not been trained on. The development of Centaur is described in a paper published today in Nature.

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