Again correct but it overstates the issue. I can say labs don’t want this. This happened arguably unintentionally in Metas llama 4 release, it went horribly, heads rolled, and like several billion dollars were paid for new talent and the org that built llama 4 was destroyed.

Evals come from a million places and new evals and robust perturbations of existing evals abound. They test a variety of tasks in a variety of ways. All of them individually are flawed. Taken together the aggregate signal is highly useful as you more or less marginalize over a lot of different things. Not to mention these companies have plenty of proprietary internal measurements, they build benchmarks themselves to probe their models and then also have flywheel traffic and A/B tests.

You are right to call out benchmarks but to dismiss them or not take them seriously is a mistake.

That’s your call just don’t expect anyone ever to take that seriously. It’s not like we don’t have exact evaluations like this.

No it’s: evaluating these systems are complex and there’s a reason why sociology, cognitive psychology, medicine, etc are all done in careful double blind conditions with pre registered tests. It’s not that humans are not smart enough, as I said human evaluations are incredibly important. And yet they are a minefield of biases you have to worry about and correct for.

- evaluations need to be done at the same time to avoid drift in your bias

- you need to worry about your test set: which questions are you asking? How many of them? Are they representative of your work?

- which one did you do first? Raters have a tendency to bias in one direction or another

- you also know the label! You know which model is which! This biases your assessment…

And on and on and on. Careful science exists for a reason.

You can call it a cult but it’s several thousand skilled workers who know what they’re doing, by and large, most of whom have a PhD and know how science and statistics work. Benchmarks are incredibly hard, and any PR or comms department at any company is going to obviously want to make things as rosy as possible, but beneath this are earnest, expensive efforts to get good quality measurements. The better you can do this the better you can compete. If you want to make a modeling decision you run an ablation, and the quality of that decision is only as good as your measurements.

That’s ok but at what point is this getting into conspiracy territory? You have just said there is nothing you would believe to the contrary, but then by definition that’s not exactly a very thoughtful or insightful position.