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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   29144 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 2026

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This would be interesting if the primary purpose of LLMs was performing well on benchmarks. The benchmark is a measure, which may be flawed for various reasons. I think everyone who isn't a grifter understands this.

In the real world, I've never heard of anyone who says a model is good because it scores well on benchmarks, or choose one model over another due to its performance on benchmarks. From Zvi:

Benchmarks have never been less useful for telling us which models are best.

They are good for giving a general sense of the landscape. They definitely paint a picture. But if you’re comparing top models, like GPT-5.4 against Opus 4.6 against Gemini 3.1 Pro, you have to use the models, talk to the models, get reports from those who have and form a gestalt. The reports will contradict each other and you have to work through that. There’s no other way.

There is a crazy gulf of understanding in those who read Zvi and those who do not.

One could argue he drinks the kool-aid too much, and he does, but people in this thread acting like benchmarks were only just discovered to be gamed is so funny.

The phrase "bench-maxxed" is like 2 years old at this point.

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