Trump's Triumph: Artificial Intelligence Correctly Predicts US President Election Winner for 4th Time in a Row

The best piece of news Republican candidate Donald Trump received during his campaign was the report that artificial intelligence (AI) MogIA predicted his victory in the 2016 U.S. election. Why would a mere prediction be such good news? MogIA had correctly predicted the last three US elections despite pre-election polls around the country claiming otherwise.

U.S. network CNBC had stated that MogIA uses 20 million data points from online services including Facebook, Google, Twitter and YouTube in the U.S. to generate its predictions by analyzing all relevant information. One telling sign had been MogIA's correct guesses regarding the results of the Democratic and Republican primaries. Majority of election polls before voting commenced announced Democratic nominee Hilary Clinton was in the lead.

MogIA is based on Mowgli, the child from Rudyard Kipling's novel "The Jungle Book." Sanjiv Rai, founder of Indian startup Genic.ai, which developed MogIA, said this is because his AI model learns from the environment. "While most algorithms suffer from programmers'/developers' biases, MoglA aims at learning from her environment, developing her own rules at the policy layer and developing expert systems without discarding any data," he told CNBC.

One way to explain how MogIA works is if someone was searching for a YouTube video on how to vote, then looked for a video on how to vote for Trump, this could give the AI a good idea of the voter's intention. Rai added that there would be no privacy concerns as these internet addresses would be anonymized.

MogIA had collected and evaluated data of public engagement with social media posts that pertain to election candidates. Prior to the official election result, MoglA found that Trump's engagement statistics beat even those of president Obama in the previous U.S. election by as much as 25 percent. "If Trump loses, it will defy the data trend for the first time in the last 12 years since Internet engagement began in full earnest," Rai had written in a report sent to CNBC before the election results were in. But MoglA was as reliable as ever. Trump's victory makes this the fourth US election in a row that MogIA has correctly predicted.