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More in AI skepticism news: Turns out most AI benchmarks are bullshit!
https://rdi.berkeley.edu/blog/trustworthy-benchmarks-cont/
Specifically the following benchmarks are trivially exploitable: SWE-bench, WebArena, OSWorld, GAIA, Terminal-Bench, FieldWorkArena, and CAR-bench.
I don't have too much to add to this, but I'll try. Assuming this paper isn't bullshit itself, it makes you wonder why no one was looking more closely at the results submitted by various AI companies. In one of our other discussions about this recently, someone said:
When I asked if they had manually verified them, they said they hadn't. It seems a lot of the things people claim about AI and its capabilities are "too good to verify", similar to how salacious stories about the other tribe in culture war stories are "too good to verify". It seems to me that a lot of people want to believe that AGI, or the death of software development, or similar things, are right around the corner. As a result, they often believe whatever the claims of sociopaths like Sam Altman, or the weirdos who believe in AGI over at Anthropic, tell them. Including, potentially, the benchmark results we see published with every new release. On the other hand, to be fair, skeptics like me can certainly be quick to believe negative stories about AI. I mean, look at me rushing to post this negative story about it here.
Regardless, I am personally of the opinion that we are near a breaking point regarding AI. I think either the bubble is going to pop and a lot of the things people claimed AI was going to take over aren't going to materialize, or they are an we are in for some major economic disruption. I don't think "AGI" is around the corner in either case though. And certain professions like SEO slop writer, translator, and others are definitely disrupted forever regardless.
Listen man, I really appreciate something other than the usual wall of singulatarianism you see on rationalist-adjacent boards, but this isn't really the best example of it. Even OpenAI called out the SWE-bench benchmarks years ago. This seems like basic "boo outgroup".
I've got some time right now, so I'm going to hijack the thread a little for some other items relevant to AI.
For those of you who didn't catch it, Sam Altman has had a busy week. First, Ronan Farrow did an expose on him in the New Yorker that did not paint a good impression of the man.
The word sociopath comes up more than once, even in a quote from Aaron Swartz:
The article is not paywalled, and it's an interesting read.
Shortly after the article was released, OpenAI's media relations team noted that Altman's house was firebombed by a lone individual.
This is where it gets interesting. I don't interact with a lot of engineers in my daily life outside of work. Most of my social group is blue collar (service industry, trades, retail), college faculty and staff, or retirees (musical connections). Someone has brought it up in every social interaction I've had in the last 24 hours, and in every case, the general sentiment was that it was a shame the guy didn't have better aim.
I was shocked. I've never seen anything quite like it. Previous recent violent attacks each had at least somebody that didn't like it. We've discussed before that a lot of Americans don't like "tech bros" and "executives" in the "Epstein" class, but I think I've severely mis calibrated how deep that loathing goes. At this point, I think that if a Mag 7 CEO got his face hacked off with a machete on live TV, the modal opinion of an American citizen watching would be indifference.
I'm not sure what the equilibrium is here, but it reminds me of the five guys CEO giving his employees a bonus so he didn't get assassinated.
In other news, Stella Lauranzo, the head of AMD's AI division, used Claude to do a fairly damning analysis of Claude's recent performance, with Lauranzo and Claude reaching the conclusion that Claude is unusable for complex engineering tasks in its current state.
This is interesting. It's not often that someone with clout in a company the size of AMD will put their name on something like this. It's also somewhat telling that Anthropic gave a polite non answer and closed the ticket.
The ticket is AI-generated, and therefore verbose even by the standards of this forum, but it seems to bring receipts. It appears that Claude Opus 4.6's capabilities are degrading for some reason.
My immediate takeaway from this is that you can no longer assume a named model and version will maintain the same capabilities over its lifecycle. Beyond that, it may explain some of my tribulations trying to get useful output from Opus 4.6. I may have simply been late to the party.
This does suggest that local models are probably a better answer for personal use. I've been messing around with Gemma 4, and I don't know if it's "there" yet, but it's better than the last Llama I tried.
This is crazy to me — I’m pretty sure most of the people around me couldn’t name Altman even if asked. People use ChatGPT, sometimes Gemini, sometimes Claude, no one thinks this is going to lead to “AGI” (a term they’re unfamiliar with), and in general ai chat is viewed as very helpful and often better than a google search, ai art is viewed mildly skeptically mostly for “can we believe photo evidence now?” reasons rather than “we must save the poor artists from the horrific slop!” reasons, and most people probably couldn’t name a single major executive involved in AI.
I’m sure the blue tribers around here are angry in these ways, but the “these evil tech billionaires are destroying society!” isn’t something I hear often irl. There’s been a lot of discussion about the Iran war and some about the Epstein files, but AI doomerism or boosterism just… isn’t a thing. It’s a technology people use, no one expects it to radically reshape the world or end it, just disrupt things a bit in the same way the smartphone did.
I guess a lot of people really don’t like AI, but my family and friends, a very small sample size, like it and use the chat models a lot for everyday tasks. I guess there’s going to be some job disruption, but I suspect that’s more because executives believe AI can do more than it actually can. It’s a tool that’s useful as an adjunct to human judgment, and I wouldn’t trust this generation of AI with truly autonomous operation of any real sort.
The descriptions he gave combine to code for a deeply blue (except for the tradies) and often very online/news-addicted circle. I hear that stuff from that sort of people all the time now - it only started a couple months ago for the most part, but it's already getting fanatical.
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