The point is that you probably can't do it repeatedly, or predict with any confidence that you can even do it once. Numerai enables you to bet using someone else's money, with a vastly reduced reward, but no risk to you.
Numerai won this time (hence the PR piece) but I don't think we should judge their performance on one action in isolation. We should judge whether their approach works based on a year or two of trading on these predictions. Maybe longer, if reacting to unusual events (economic collapse, freak speculation on tulips, etc) is something you care about.
Plus, Numerai gives them opaque features for ML training that correspond to real-life data in ways that only Numerai knows. So you can't bail and use your model on your own.
Numerai won this time (hence the PR piece) but I don't think we should judge their performance on one action in isolation. We should judge whether their approach works based on a year or two of trading on these predictions. Maybe longer, if reacting to unusual events (economic collapse, freak speculation on tulips, etc) is something you care about.