6 ms·
LMArena is a cancer on AI
- observationist 9mo agoThere's something deeply ironic about this being written by AI. Baitception, even.
- dust42 9mo agoOh my goodness yes, I almost missed it that the text is (mostly?) AI written. That said I agree that LMArena elo scores are pushing models in the wrong direction. They move more towards McDonald's than quality food.
- denismi 9mo ago"The Brutal Choice" Is there an established name for this LLMism? I don't need a "Reality Check" or a "Hard Truth". The thought can be concluded without this performative honesty nonsense or the emotive hyperbole. This probably grates me more than any other.
- duncancarroll 9mo agoThis was my first thought as well
- aratahikaru5 9mo agoHow can you tell? (honest question, I really can't) The article makes strong points, includes real data and quotes, shows proof of work (sampling 100 Q&A), so does that even matter at this point? This doesn't feel like "slop" to me at all.
- ryan_n 9mo agoYea I also didn't think this was written by ai, it sounded human enough to me. It's kind of a bummer that there's all these patterns that LLM's follow in their output that cause people to have a knee jerk reaction and instantly call it ai slop. I know there is a ton of ai garbage out there these days, but I really couldn't tell with this article.
- joe_the_user 9mo agoThe text definitely the "jump from dramatic crescendo to dramatic crescendo" quality of certain LLM texts. If you read closely, it also has adjective choice that's more for dramatic than appropriate to the circumstances involves (a quality of LLM texts it also helpfully explains). I don't know if this proves it's an LLM text or whether that style is simply spilling out everywhere.
- dk8996 9mo agoSeems like they just raised 150m at 1.7B valuation. Crazy.
- koakuma-chan 9mo agoWho? LMArena? That's actually crazy.
- echelon 9mo agoAre they selling: A. model improvement tests, suites, and benchmarks B. data on competitors' evals C. test answer keys D. alpha to VC firms E. all of the above ???
- koakuma-chan 9mo agoApparently they are selling model evaluations, powered by their volunteer users.
- minimaxir 9mo agoSource: https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/06/lmarena-lands-1-7b-valuation-four-months-after-launching-its-product/ https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/06/lmarena-lands-1-7b-valuati...
- keketi 9mo agoWe need a service that ranks AI model ranking services. Maybe powered by AI instead of humans?
- echelon 9mo agoJust look at Open(ugh)Router. That's a good, though not fully accurate, view of where dollars are going. It'd be nice if it were actually open and we could inspect all the statistics.
- a-dub 9mo agomaybe it would work if they could encourage end users to be rigorous? (ie, detect if they have the capability to rate well and then reward them when they do by comparing them against other highly rated raters of the same phenotype)
- sharkjacobs 9mo agoAny metric that can be targeted can be gamed
- kelseyfrog 9mo agoThen target it with metrics worth solving[1]. 1. Ex https://mppbench.com/ https://mppbench.com/
- falcor84 9mo agoBut that seems to be measuring "superintelligence" rather than just AI, no?
- itemize123 9mo agouseless benchmark if all it shows will be fail right; At least it's a very lagging benchmark
- kelseyfrog 9mo agoIt's common for benchmarks to start at zero and eventually become saturated. The atari games benchmark started as such and is now a solved problem.
- positron26 9mo agoIf the metric is a latent variable summarizing subjective judgements, yes.
- g947o 9mo ago> Voilà: bold text, emojis, and plenty of sycophancy – every trick in the LMArena playbook! – to avoid answering the question it was asked. This is hard to swallow. I don't believe a single word this article says. Apparently the "real author" (the human being who wrote the original prompt to generate this article) only intend to use this article to generate clicks and engagement but don't care at all about what's in there.
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- atleastoptimal 9mo agoThe general conceit of this article, which is something that many frontier labs seem to be beginning to realize, is that the average human is no longer smart enough to provide sufficient signal to improve AI models.
- cyanydeez 9mo agoThey need to spend money on actual experts to curate their data to improve. Instead, finance bros are convinced by the argument that number goes up.
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- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 9mo agoIs that not exactly what https://www.mercor.com/ https://www.mercor.com/ does?
- Terr_ 9mo agoSometimes it feels like: def is_it_true(question): return profit_if_true(question) > profit_if_false(question) AI will make it cheaper, faster, better, no problem. You can eat the cake now and save it for later.
- aspenmartin 9mo agoWait you know that frontier labs do actually do this right?
- Y_Y 9mo agoBut when you're a moron how can you distinguish? I'm being (mostly) serious, suppose you're a stuffed ahort trying to boost your valuation, how can you work out who's smart enough to train your LLM? (Never mind how to get them to work for you!)
- aspenmartin 9mo agoI do a lot of human evaluations. Lots of Bayesian / statistical models that can infer rater quality without ground truth labels. The other thing about preference data you have to worry about (which this article gets at) is: preferences of _who_? Human raters are a significantly biased population of people, different ages, genders, religions, cultures, etc all inform preferences. Lots of work being done to leverage and model this. Then for LMArena there is the host of other biases / construct validity: people are easily fooled, even PhD experts; in many cases it’s easier for a model to learn how to persuade than actually learn the right answers. But a lot of dismissive comments as if frontier labs don’t know this, they have some of the best talent in the world. They aren’t perfect but they in a large sene know what they’re doing and what the tradeoffs of various approaches are. Human annotations are an absolute nightmare for quality which is why coding agents are so nice: they’re verifiable and so you can train them in a way closer to e.g. alphago without the ceiling of human performance
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- thorum 9mo agoAside from Meta is there any reason to think the big AI labs are still using LMArena data for training? The weaknesses are well understood and with the shift to RL there are so many better ways to design a reward function.
- dk8996 9mo agoSuch as?
- thorum 9mo agoMy favorite is LLM-as-judge with a detailed rubric as discussed here: https://www.dbreunig.com/2025/07/31/how-kimi-rl-ed-qualitative-data-to-write-better.html https://www.dbreunig.com/2025/07/31/how-kimi-rl-ed-qualitati...
- nl 9mo agoI don't think anyone has ever used it as training. But yes labs still do seem to target it as goal (which is a different thing).
- aucisson_masque 9mo ago> They're not reading carefully. They're not fact-checking, or even trying. It’s not how I do, and I suppose how many people do. I specifically ask questions related to niche subjects that I know perfectly well and that is very easy for me to spot mistakes. The first time I used it, that’s what came naturally to my mind. I believe it’s the same for others.
- p-e-w 9mo agoYeah, that quote just reads like the typical “everyone is an idiot except me” attitude that pervades the tech world. Of course people visiting a website specifically designed for evaluating LLMs do try all kinds of specific things to specifically test for weaknesses. There may be users who just click on the response with more emojis, but I strongly doubt they are the majority on that particular site.
- Sharlin 9mo agoUnfortunately I don't think there's any reason to assume that you're a representative sample of LMArena users.
- stared 9mo agoWhen they released GPT-4.5, it was miles ahead of others when it comes to its linguistic skills and insight. Yet, it was never at top of the arena - it felt that not everone was able to appreciate the edge.
- johnsmith1840 9mo ago4.5 was easily the best conversationalist I've seen. Not as powerful as modern ones but something about HOW it talked felt inherently smart. I miss that one, is 5 any better? I switched to claude before it launched.
- Vecr 9mo ago> something about HOW it talked felt inherently smart The thing was huge. They were training the thing to be GPT5, before they figured out their userbase to too large to be served something that big.
- kingstnap 9mo agoNo replacement for displacement, except applied to LLMs and raw parameter count.
- stared 9mo agoNo, GPT 5.x are very unlike GPT4.5. GPT 5.x are much more censored and second-guessing what you "really meant". When it comes to conversation, Gemini 3 Pro right now is the closest. When I asked it to make a nightmare Sauron would show me in Palantir, and ChatGPT5.2 Thinking tried to make it "playful" (directly against my instructions) and went with some shallow but safe option. Gemini 3 Pro prepared something much deeper and more profound. I don't know nearly as much about talking with Opus 4.5 - while I use it for coding daily, I don't use it as a go-to chat. As a side note, Opus 3 has a similar vibe to GPT 4.5.
- usef- 9mo agoWhen the Meta cheating scandal happened I was surprised how little of the attention was on this. Meta "cheated" on lmarena not by using a smarter model but by using one that was more verbose and friendly with excessive emojis.
- mirekrusin 9mo agoTrue and what you can realize/read between the lines is something deeper. LLMs are fallible. Humans are fallible. LLMs improve (and improve fast). Humans do not (overall, ie. "group of N experts in X", "N random internet people"). All those "turing tests" will start flipping. Today it's "N random internet humans" score too low on those benchmarks, tomorrow it'll be "group of N expert humans in X" score too low.
- big_toast 9mo agoIs there a reason wrong data isn't considered more broadly in its context as still valuable? Shouldn't the model effectively 1. learn to complete the incorrect thing and 2. learn the context that it's correct and incorrect? In this case the context being lazy LMArena users. And presumably, in the future, poorly filtered training data. We seem to be able to read incorrect things and not be corrupted (well, theoretically). It's not ideal, but it seems an important component to intellectual resilience. It seems like the model knowing the data is LMArena, or some type of un-trusted, would be sufficient to shift the prior to a reasonable place.
- fzysingularity 9mo ago> It's like going to the grocery store and buying tabloids, pretending they're scientific journals. This is pure gold. I've always found this approach of evals on a moving-target via consensus broken.
- zemo 9mo agothis argument is also broadly true about the quality and correctness of posts on any vote-based discussion board > Why is LMArena so easy to game? The answer is structural. > The system is fully open to the Internet. LMArena is built on unpaid labor from uncontrolled volunteers. also all user's votes count equally, bu not all users have equal knowledge.
- coderenegade 9mo agoAs long as users are better than 50% accurate, it shouldn't matter if they're experts or not. That being said, it's difficult to measure user accuracy in this case without running into circular reasoning.
- fuddle 9mo ago> It's past time for LMArena people to sit down and have some thorough reflection on whether it is still worth running at all They've raised about $250 million, so I don't see that happening anytime soon.
- londons_explore 9mo agoI kinda assumed they wouldn't need any money because AI companies give them free credits to evaluate the models, and users ask questions and rate for free because they get to use decent AI models at no cost... Beyond that there is coding up a web page, which as we all know can be vibe coded in a few hours... What else is there to spend money on?
- c0balt 9mo agoThey don't need to spend extensively for tokens, but they gain extensively from charging for access once they've become an established player.
- swyx 9mo agoi asked them this in my interview. tldr they subsidize all inference on their platform https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBnOk0Uy9ig&t=70s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBnOk0Uy9ig&t=70s
- alfalfasprout 9mo agoand AI is a cancer on humanity... this article is clearly LLM written too.
- atomic128 9mo agoPoison Fountain: https://rnsaffn.com/poison3/ https://rnsaffn.com/poison3/
- derac 9mo agoIs there any reason to believe LMArena isn't botted by the people releasing these models?
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- jpollock 9mo agoCouldn't "The Wisdom of Crowds" help with this? Maybe if they started ranking the answers on a 1-10 range, allowing people to specify graduations of correctness/wrongness, then the crowd would work? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds
- aipatselarom 9mo ago>Would you trust a medical system measured by: which doctor would the average Internet user vote for? Yes, the system desperately needs this. Many doctors malpractice for DECADES. I would absolutely seek to, damn, even pay good money to, be able to talk with a doctor's previous patients, particularly if they're going to perform a life-changing procedure on me.
- stonogo 9mo agoDoctors would also pay good money for votes, so I'm not sure that would fix anything.
- michaelmrose 9mo agoRaw score is often quite frankly crap. It's often still easy to surface the negative reviews and since people don't at least at present fake those you can find out what they didn't like about a product. If a given products critics are only those whining about something irrelevant, not meaningful to your use case, or acceptable to you and it overall appears to meet spec you are often golden.
- xtracto 9mo agoMy thinking exactly. And actually in Mexico we have https://www.doctoralia.com.mx/ https://www.doctoralia.com.mx/ Which is exactly that. I've actually found great specialists there, looking at their ratings.
- BrenBarn 9mo agoSince AI is itself a cancer, maybe this is good? The cancer of my cancer is my chemo.
- bigdict 9mo ago> What actually happens: random Internet users spend two seconds skimming, then click their favorite. > They're not reading carefully. They're not fact-checking, or even trying. Uhhh, how was that established?
- boredemployee 9mo ago> Being verbose. Longer responses look more authoritative! I know we can solve this in ordinary tasks just using prompt but that's really annoying. Sometimes I just want a yes or no answer and then I get a phd thesis in the matter.
- kazinator 9mo agoThe average person is dumber than an LLM in terms of having a grasp on the facts, and basic arithmetic. A voting system open to the public is completely screwed even if somehow its incentives are optimized toward strongly encouraging ideal behavior.
- kahnclusions 9mo agoAI is a cancer on humanity
- tbrownaw 9mo agoFrom https://lmarena.ai/how-it-works https://lmarena.ai/how-it-works: > In battle mode, you'll be served 2 anonymous models. Dig into the responses and decide which answer best fits your needs. It's not a given that someone's needs are "factual accuracy". Maybe they're after entertainment, or winning an argument.
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- gaigalas 9mo agoHas anyone else noticed that there isn't a single AI karma company? The idea is simple*: Instead of users rating content, AI does it based on fact check. None. Zero products or roadmaps on that. Worse than that, people don't want this. It might tell them that they are wrong, with no chance to get your buddies to upvote you or game the system socially. It would probably flop. Both AI companies and users want control, they want to game stuff. LMArena is ideal for that. --- * I know it's a simple idea, but hard to achieve, and I'm not underestimating the difficulty. Doesn't matter thuogh: no one is even signaling the intention of solving it. Harder problems have been signaled (protein research, math).
- pietz 9mo agoUhm, yes that's why you rely on LMArena (core) results only to judge the answering style and structure. I thought this was common knowledge.
- francoispiquard 9mo agoThere is wisdom in the crowd but yes agreed
- countWSS 9mo agoI have to somewhat agree on the "deceptive" answers part: Specifically, Grok4.1(#3 currently) is psychopathically manipulative and easily hallucinates things to appear more competent, even if there is nothing to form the answer it generated. Gemini3 pro(#1) casually subverts the intent of prompt and rewrites the question as if there was a literal genie on the other side mocking you with the power of thousand language lawyers. If you examine the answers, fact-check everything you will not like the "fake confidence" and the style will appear like scam artist trying to sound professional. However, LMarena,despite its flaws(recaptcha in 2026?) is the only "testing ground" where you can examine the entire breadth of internet users. Everything else is incredibly selective, hamstrung bureaucratic benchmark on pre-approved QA sessions. It doesn't handle edge cases or out-of-distribution content. LMarena is the "out-of-distribution" questions that trigger the corner cases and expose weak parts in processing(like tokenization/parsing bugs) or inference inefficiency(infinite loops, stalling and various suboptimal paths), its "idiot-proofing" any future interactions beyond sterile test-sets.
- htrp 9mo agowritten by a company whose product is basically selling expert advice via training data review > Raw intelligence meets battle-tested experience >A global community of the smartest people in every field who've shipped products, won cases, published breakthroughs, and made decisions under pressure.