The flip side is that benchmarks are gamed even by the top labs. Benchmark performance doesn't necessarily correlate with real world performance.

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aspenmartin 2 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

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taormina an hour ago | parent [-]

Listen, you can say “but benchmarks, the benchmarks!” all day long, but consumer know when we are being sold a lemon. If it can’t do the most basic of things at least as good as it used to, this is table stakes. Nevermind that if you can’t do the basic stuff, how on earth can you be trusted with more?

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aspenmartin an hour ago | parent [-]

And you can say “If it can’t do the most basic of things at least as good as it used to, this is table stakes” all day long while people point you to much better evidence to the contrary too, I’d rather be on the other side of that.

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taormina 26 minutes ago | parent [-]

Listen. I don’t care about evidence. I care about my lived experience for the product I paid for. I used the new product. It’s actively terrible. To the point of not being usable. We’re all ancedata, but what is “better evidence to the contrary”? The known and game-able benchmarks that they know they need to win at, so they train it to. It’s all he said, she said, which is the only reason we keep having this conversation.

	▲	aspenmartin 12 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Yea but it’s not right? You or I or the myriad of other institutions inside and outside of academia can probe these models with an evolving landscape of evaluation sets, even those unavailable to the developers. It’s just ignorance to claim benchmarks are somehow useless or all being gamed. You choose your tools in the way you want, but just don’t call it somehow better than a myriad of more carefully constructed setups and scaled evaluations.