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If benchmarks didn’t exist we would have to invent them because “vibes” is a ridiculous idea: oh I know I’ll be super unscientific and horrendously biased and t
by aspenmartin 4mo ago
If benchmarks didn’t exist we would have to invent them because “vibes” is a ridiculous idea: oh I know I’ll be super unscientific and horrendously biased and that’s far better than a team of experts carefully AND CONTINUALLY developing a variety of benchmarks of varying quality that…hmm all point to the same thing.
You can’t benchmaxx an eval that comes after your model release.
Consider also benchmaxxing makes no sense from an incentive structure: the quality of these models is directly correlated by how well you can measure true performance in the wild. If they were just stupidly benchmaxxing they would be unable to do trustworthy ablations or know how well the model will perform in their product.
Remember the famous case of asserted benchmaxxing from llama 4? The entire org was gutted and the ceo spent billions hiring better people. Every lab takes evaluations extremely seriously.
- bcrosby95 4mo agoVibes is just UX. There's whole careers, teams, and even industries dedicated to it, and yeah it isn't easy because you need aggregate data from people.
- aspenmartin 4mo agoUm kind of but not really, it’s a mix of UX and actual measurements of what tasks it can do. Also UX is virtually the same thing: scaled quantitative surveys and preference metrics. It’s again, just benchmarking, and it’s done carefully and with best practices.
- joquarky 4mo agoImagine unironically starting your comment with "Um" in 2026.
- aspenmartin 4mo agoYou don't have to imagine!
- jaapz 4mo agoAs opposed to your incredibly useful contribution to this thread, thanks!
- ElevenLathe 4mo ago> You can’t benchmaxx an eval that comes after your model release Sure you can, just do it silently and don't tell the people hitting your API that the model is different now. Unless it's open weight, we're just taking your word for it. Even better, do a VW and try to detect which benchmark is running, then change to a hyper specialized model that is trained on it.
- aspenmartin 4mo ago> Sure you can, just do it silently and don't tell the people hitting your API that the model is different now. Unless it's open weight, we're just taking your word for it. Even better, do a VW and try to detect which benchmark is running, then change to a hyper specialized model that is trained on it. This is...just incredibly conspiratorial and a bit silly. You can make a benchmark right now and run it on the models. They'll have a benchmaxxed model on your...previously non-existent benchmark? I mean: if models really were overfit to benchmarks, which zero lab is doing because its idiotic, against their incentive structure, and easy to detect, then why would we see a slow ascension of performance on say humanity's last exam for one benchmark example? You could trivially get those numbers to close to 100% if you wanted to.
- andai 4mo agoYeah, nobody's ever silently changed a model while it was deployed. That would be illegal!
- aspenmartin 4mo agoWhy does this have anything to do with what I’m saying, of course the models are updated. I’m saying a new benchmark isn’t public and the model wouldn’t know they are being evaluated on a new benchmark. Not to mention: thinking that the api behind the scenes is literally swapping to overfit models to maintain some sort of illusion that they perform well on these benchmarks is just beyond ridiculous.
- 4mo ago