UFC middleweight Bo Nickal is using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to analyze his opponents’ fight patterns and plan accordingly, similar to the way Iron Man called upon F.R.I.D.A.Y. when fighting Captain America at the end of Marvel’s Civil War.
Shut up, it was a good movie.
“I’ll go into Chat GPT, and you have to ask it the right questions,” Nickal told Joe Rogan. “But I’ll say, ‘Hey, formulate a game plan for this type of fighter. I’m a wrestler at middleweight, this that, blah, blah, blah, and I’m going to fight this guy — give me the perfect gameplan for him.’ It’s not like ‘boom,’ easy, you kind of have to prod it a little bit, but it’ll get closer.”
I’m sure seasoned MMA coaches who spent years developing gameplans based on real-world experience will be pleased to know how disposable they’ve become in the face of nerdy computer data, sort of like the bitter talent scouts in Moneyball.
Yes, another movie reference.
“I would say, ‘Formulate a gameplan for a wrestler against a striker in an MMA fight under these rules,’ and then I would ask it more detailed questions from there,” Nickal continued. “It’s given me good information, so we’ll see where it can go. In five years, it’ll probably be able to download video of somebody and tell you every one of their weaknesses.”
The same AI that’s giving him gameplans also picked him to lose by knockout.
No doubt Nickal, 27, is already hard at work, along with some help from ChatGPT, planning for his Cody Brundage fight at the upcoming UFC 300 pay-per-view (PPV) event in April. The former Nittany Lion, undefeated at 5-0, is currently a -1450 betting favorite.