# What to use instead of INFER

INFER became the RAND Forecasting Initiative, and RFI has concluded — infer-pub.com is now a read-only archive. Where a forecaster's habit and record go next.

*https://predictionmarkets.tools/alternatives/infer*

## The subject

| Field | Value |
| --- | --- |
| Product | INFER |
| Status | retired |
| Stopped serving | 2026-07-27 |
| Website | https://www.infer-pub.com/ |
| Category | Forecasting Platforms |

A public crowd forecasting program whose aggregated estimates fed US policy research — seasons of scored geopolitical, technology and policy questions, ranked by relative Brier score and argued in written rationales.

## Replacements

*Ordered by how much of the original’s job each one covers, closest first. Paid placement does not affect this order.*

1. [Good Judgment Open](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/good-judgment-open.md) — The same metric on the same kind of question — challenges scored by relative Brier against the crowd median, with rationales and a route to paid work.
2. [Metaculus](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/metaculus.md) — A public track record kept under Baseline and Peer scores, on policy and technology questions written to resolve, with tournaments that carry prize pools.
3. [Manifold](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/manifold.md) — The one place you can open the question yourself instead of waiting for a season to publish it. Play money, so the only thing at stake is your score.
4. [Futuur](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/futuur.md) — Runs the same geopolitical questions twice, in play money and in stablecoins, for a forecaster who wants calibration to cost something. Not open to the US.

## The product

INFER was a crowd forecasting program aimed at people who make decisions with public money. You
answered geopolitical, technology and policy questions with a probability, wrote a rationale
arguing for it, and were scored — the aggregate was used as an input to research rather than sold
back to you as a product.

It changed hands twice without changing platform. The archive's own overview, read on
19 September 2026, gives the sequence: Foretell at Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging
Technology, then INFER at the University of Maryland's ARLIS, then the RAND Forecasting
Initiative. The platform was built and operated throughout by Cultivate Labs, which is why the
site looked the same across three sponsors and why a forecaster's history survived each handover.

The record it left is specific, and the archive publishes the totals: 3,433 forecasters, 200,901
forecasts, 409 questions published and 298 scored, 183,752 rationales, across 7 seasons whose
leaderboards are labelled 2020 through 2026. Standings are ranked by relative Brier score — lower
is better, and the number is relative to the crowd, not absolute. The question archive carries all
298 scored questions with how each resolved and how the crowd's aggregate moved over the life of
the question; six are marked as not resolved, all of them multiple-select questions where no
listed option occurred.

Then it stopped. The banner on every page of the archive reads that the RAND Forecasting
Initiative has concluded, that this is a permanent read-only archive, and that accounts,
forecasting and comments are no longer available. `infer-pub.com` now answers a 301 redirect to
`randforecastinginitiative.org`, which was still the case on 19 September 2026.

**One thing we could not establish.** The archive names no closure date, and RAND's own programme
page returned a 403 to us rather than a statement. The date on this page — 27 July 2026 — is the
latest resolution date in the archive's own question table, not an announcement, and it is the
most defensible end date available from a primary source. The programme's About and FAQ pages are
gone from the archive as well, both 404 on 19 September 2026, so nothing about its remit beyond
the overview page is checkable today.

## What to use instead

The habit and the record are two different losses, and they point at different places.

**If what you want is the same scoring and the same seriousness**,
[Good Judgment Open](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/good-judgment-open) is the nearest thing running. Challenges are
scored by relative Brier score against the crowd median, which is the metric you already think in;
questions are geopolitical and resolve against named sources or credible open-source evidence; and
the top of the leaderboard is a recruiting ground rather than a wall of names, which gives the
score an outlet INFER's did not have.

**If what you want is a track record that a stranger can read**,
[Metaculus](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/metaculus) publishes yours under Baseline and Peer scores, with a longer
question set and tournaments carrying real prize pools. Its scoring is log-score-based rather than
Brier-based, so your instincts about what a given number means will need recalibrating for a few
months.

**If what you miss is the questions**, none of these will publish yours on a policy sponsor's
timetable — but [Manifold](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/manifold) will publish it in a minute, because anyone can open a
question and anyone can resolve their own. It is play money in mana, the crowd is much broader
than INFER's and much less specialist, and the discipline is entirely self-imposed. It is the only
card here where the supply of questions is the users' problem rather than an editor's.

**If the scoring was never quite enough**, [Futuur](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/futuur) runs every question twice, in
play-money Ooms and in USDC or USDT, on politics, macro and science — a way to find out whether
your calibration survives having a position. Real money is barred in the US, the UK, Canada and
much of the EU, so check the terms against where you live before assuming it applies to you. The
rest of the [prediction market venues](https://predictionmarkets.tools/categories/prediction-market-venues) category is the same
trade at different prices.

## What you give up

**A named consumer for the crowd's answer.** INFER's aggregate went into research that informed
policy analysis. That is the whole difference between forecasting and a scoreboard, and none of
the four replaces it: Metaculus and Manifold publish to whoever reads, Good Judgment Open feeds
its own organisation's commercial work, and Futuur's consumer is the market price. If you
forecast because someone with a decision to make was reading, that reader is gone and no card
brings them back.

**A question set written by somebody with a stake in the answer.** 409 questions over seven
seasons, narrow, resolvable and sourced, on subjects a sponsor needed answers to. Metaculus comes
closest and its agenda is its own; Manifold's volume is far larger and its median question is not
remotely that; sports and crypto questions dominate on the venues. You will spend real time
filtering to find what INFER simply published.

**Your standing, permanently.** The leaderboards are frozen and the metric does not port. A
relative Brier score is measured against one crowd on one question set; arriving at Good Judgment
Open with a good INFER record means arriving at zero scored questions, and the number you earned
there cannot be compared with the number you earn here. Five years of work is now a page you can
link, and nothing more.

**The rationales.** 183,752 of them were written and the comment threads are not in the archive —
comments are explicitly among the things no longer available. For most serious forecasters the
argument under a question was the reason to show up, and that is the part of the record that was
not preserved.

## Migration notes

**Save your standing today, not eventually.** The archive has no export button, but it does not
need one: the leaderboard page embeds its data as JSON in a `script` tag with the id
`leaderboard-data`, the table rows are server-rendered, and the question index is plain HTML. One
`curl` of the leaderboards and questions pages puts your rank, your scored-question count and your
relative Brier on your own disk. "Permanent" is a plan, not a guarantee, and archives with no
budget line behind them have a way of becoming DNS entries.

**Keep the same username.** The archive lists forecasters under the handle they chose, so a stable
handle across Good Judgment Open, Metaculus and Manifold is the only thing that makes a link to
your INFER standing evidence about *you* rather than about a stranger with a good Brier score.

**Your individual forecasts are not there.** Only leaderboards and question-level crowd
trajectories were preserved. If you kept your own spreadsheet of forecasts and updates — many
forecasters did — it just became the only copy, and it is worth normalising into something you can
carry: question text, close date, your probability, the date of each update, the outcome.

**Do not read your new score as a continuation of the old one.** Relative Brier against a crowd
median, Metaculus's Peer and Baseline scores, and Manifold's published Brier measure three
different things. The first month on a new platform is noise from a different distribution, not
evidence that you got worse.

**Start with questions that overlap.** The fastest way to find out whether a platform suits you is
to forecast something you already forecast at INFER and have an opinion about — a macro release, a
conflict milestone, a technology-diffusion threshold — rather than a sports market you would never
otherwise have opened.

## FAQ

### Is my INFER account gone?

Yes. The archive notice states that accounts, forecasting and comments are no longer available. What survives is the leaderboards and the scored questions, with forecasters listed under the username they chose.

### Can I download my own forecast history?

Not from the archive. It preserves final accuracy standings and question-level crowd trajectories, not individual forecast records, and it offers no export button. A per-forecast history you did not save before the platform closed is not recoverable there.

### Does my relative Brier score transfer to another platform?

No, and it would not mean the same thing if it did. A relative Brier score is measured against one particular crowd on one particular question set. Good Judgment Open uses the same metric against a different crowd, and Metaculus scores against a different baseline entirely.

### Who actually ran INFER?

Three sponsors in sequence, on one platform. Foretell came from the Center for Security and Emerging Technology at Georgetown, INFER ran at the University of Maryland's ARLIS, and RAND ran it last as the RAND Forecasting Initiative. Cultivate Labs built and operated the platform throughout.