19/07/2025
A new AI model can predict your life's biggest events with remarkable accuracy โ including when you'll die.
In a groundbreaking advance, scientists have created an AI system that can predict major life eventsโand even estimate when a person might die. The model, called life2vec, was developed by researchers in Denmark and the US and trained on life-event data from six million people over a decade. By analyzing this detailed informationโcovering everything from health records and job history to income and educationโthe AI learns to recognize patterns and forecast outcomes with startling precision, including psychological traits and mortality risk.
Built on the same transformer architecture that powers language models like ChatGPT, life2vec treats a person's life as a sequence of events, turning real-world experiences into data points it can analyze like words in a sentence. The system not only outperforms existing models in predicting early death and other complex traits but also offers a new way to understand how social factors shape our futures. While the potential benefits for healthcare and public policy are immense, researchers warn that privacy, data ethics, and the risk of misuse must be urgently addressed as predictive AI enters this deeply personal territory.
Source: Savcisens, G., Eliassi-Rad, T., Hansen, L.K. et al. Using sequences of life-events to predict human lives. Nat Comput Sci 4, 43โ56 (2024).