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zamadatix 8 hours ago

The price/scaling of training another same class model always seems to be dropping through the floor but training models which score much better seems to be hitting a brick wall.

E.g. gemini-3-pro tops the lmarena text chart today at 1488 vs 1346 for gpt-4o-2024-05-13. That's a win rate of 70% (where 50% is equal chance of winning) over 1.5 years. Meanwhile, even the open weights stuff OpenAI gave away last summer scores between the two.

The exception seems to be net new benchmarks/benchmark versions. These start out low and then either quickly get saturated or hit a similar wall after a while.

gwern 6 hours ago | parent [-]

> E.g. gemini-3-pro tops the lmarena text chart today at 1488 vs 1346 for gpt-4o-2024-05-13. That's a win rate of 70% (where 50% is equal chance of winning) over 1.5 years. Meanwhile, even the open weights stuff OpenAI gave away last summer scores between the two.

Why do you care about LM Arena? It has so many problems, and the fact that no one would suggest using GPT-4o for doing math or coding right now, or much of anything, should tell you that a 'win rate of 70%' does not mean whatever it looks like it means. (Does GPT-4o solve roughly as many Erdos questions as gemini-3-pro...? Can you write roughly as good poetry?)

zamadatix 5 hours ago | parent [-]

It'd certainly be odd if people were recommending old LLMs which score worse, even if marginally. That said, 4o is really a lot more usable than you're making it out to be.

The particular benchmark in the example is fungible but you have to pick something to make a representative example. No matter which you pick someone always has a reason "oh, it's not THAT benchmark you should look at". The benchmarks from the charts in the post exhibit the same as described above.

If someone was making new LLMs which were consistently solving Erdos problems at rapidly increasing rates then they'd be showing how it does that rather than showing how it scores the same or slightly better on benchmarks. Instead the progress is more like years since we were surprised LLMs were writing poetry to massage out an answer to one once. Maybe by the end of the year a few. The progress has definitely become very linear and relatively flat compared to roughly the initial 4o release. I'm just hoping that's a temporary thing rather than a sign it'll get even flatter.

nl 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Progress has not become linear. We've just hit the limits of what we can measure and explain easily.

One year ago coding agents could barely do decent auto-complete.

Now they can write whole applications.

That's much more difficult to show than an ELO score based on how people like emjois and bold text in their chat responses.

Don't forget Llama4 led Lmarena and turned out to be very weak.

refulgentis 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Frankly, this reads as a lot of words that amount to an excuse for using only LMArena, and the rationale is quite clear: it’s for an unrelated argument that isn’t going to ring true to people, especially an audience of programmers who just spent the last year watching the AI go from being able to make coherent file edits to multi hour work.

LMArena is, de facto, a sycophancy and Markdown usage detector.

Two others you can trust, off the top of my head, are LiveBench.ai and Artifical Analysis. Or even Humanity’s Last Exam results. (Though, frankly, I’m a bit suspicious of them. Can’t put my finger on why. Just was a rather rapid hill climb for a private benchmark over the last year.)

FWIW GPT 5.2 unofficial marketing includes the Erdos thing you say isn’t happening.

zamadatix 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I've always found LiveBench a bit confusing to try to compare over time as the dataset isn't meant to be compared over time. It also currently claims GPT-5 Mini High from last summer is within ~15% of Claude 4.5 Opus Thinking High Effort in the average, but I'll wait with bated breath for the millions of amazing apps which couldn't be coded before to start showing up (or, more likely, be told in 6 months how these 2 benchmarks weren't the ones that should matter either). Artificial Analysis at least has the same at 20% from the top, so maybe that's the one we all agree to use for now since it implies faster growth.

> FWIW GPT 5.2 unofficial marketing includes the Erdos thing you say isn’t happening.

Certainly not, unless you're about to tell me I can pop into ChatGPT and pop out Erdos proofs regularly since #728 was massaged out with multiple prompts and external tooling a few weeks ago - which is what I was writing about. It was great, it was exciting, but it's exactly the slow growth I'm talking about.

I like using LLMs, I use them regularly, and I'm hoping they continue to get better for a long time... but this is in no way the GPT 3 -> 3.5 -> 4 era of mind boggling growth of frontier models anymore. At best, people are finding out how to attach various tooling to the models to eek more out as the models themselves very slowly improve.

nl an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> I'll wait with bated breath for the millions of amazing apps which couldn't be coded before to start showing up

Appstore releases were roughly linear until July 25 and are up 60% since then:

https://www.coatue.com/c/takes/chart-of-the-day-2026-01-22

refulgentis an hour ago | parent [-]

One of the best surgically executed nukes on HN in my 16 years here.

refulgentis an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

See peer reply re: yes, your self-chosen benchmark has been reached.

Generally, I've learned to warn myself off of a take when I start writing emotionally charged stuff like [1]. Without any prompting (who mentioned apps? and why would you without checking?), also, when reading minds, and assigning weak arguments, now and in my imagination of the future. [2]

At the very least, [2] is a signal to let the keyboard have a rest, and ideally my mind.

Bailey: > "If [there were] new LLMs...consistently solving Erdos problems at rapidly increasing rates then they'd be showing...that"

Motte: > "I can['t] pop into ChatGPT and pop out Erdos proofs regularly"

No less than Terence Tao, a month ago, pointing out your bailey was newly happening with the latest generation: https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/115788262274999408. Not sure how you only saw one Erdos problem.

[1] "I'll wait with bated breath for the millions of amazing apps which couldn't be coded before to start showing up"

[2] "...or, more likely, be told in 6 months how these 2 benchmarks weren't the ones that should matter either"