Goldman Sachs' AI predicts Brazil will win the World Cup

Goldman Sachs is giving another go at predicting which team will win this year's World Cup. After incorrectly predicting how the 2014 tournament would turn out, it's trying again and its calculations say that France, Brazil, Portugal and Germany will make it to the semi-finals with Brazil beating out Germany in the final game. The financial firm used machine learning to come up with these predictions, feeding team characteristics, individual player data and recent team performance information into four machine learning models, which then compared that data to the scores of all of the World Cup and European Cup matches since 2005. Goldman Sachs then ran one million simulations of World Cup outcomes to determine who would come out on top. Of course, you can't account for all of the variables that influence how a tournament will play out -- something made quite clear in 2014.