There are a couple of different ways to categorize prediction-markets as they exist today.  One way to slice them is based on their infrastructure:

Centralized:

• One of the longest lived AI-driven ‘prediction’ markets today is Numerai.  It’s contests have been a gravity well for data scientists for nearly a decade.
• Another arena for professional and amateur modelers alike is Kaggle, from Google.
• Metaculus caters to a similar intellectual community: quants that are attempting to model the future.
• Kalshi and PredicIt (and a slew of imitators) which provide capped bets and wagers for a variety of events (the imitators often focus on sports betting).

Decentralized

• Polymarket, dYdX, and Drift currently have the largest marketshare of ‘prediction’ markets in the blockchain universe.

Infrastructure differences aside, what commonality do all of these projects and organizations all share?  Contract issuance and trading are silo’ed.  Even blockchain-related platforms mimic the existing TradFi futures exchange model (e.g., can only trade WTI on Nymex).  One other difference is that a prediction market (as they are often advertised today) is based around a specific, discrete event (such as an election or a football game), whereas a forecast contract or forecast market is based on a reoccurring event / time series (such as CO2 emissions, unemployment rate, inflation, etc.).

What seems to be missing are tools for forecast modelers to be able to take an arbitrary time series and construct a futures product that continually rolls over (e.g., a perpetual).  This can be done in centralized or decentralized manner but to actually be decentralized, the clearing of the contract arguably should also be separated from the trading venue (crypto assets ‘took off’ because they could be traded independent of venue, yet all crypto perpetuals are venue dependent).  Will 2025 be the year in which such a decoupling finally takes place?  Has anyone created the GPT for these types of contracts and markets?

At the moment, I think one of the biggest unknowns for a trader entering into forecast futures is the question of how they would hedge their exposures.  E.g., a market maker for a futures market today can always construct a hedge using the spot market… but what if the spot does not exist?