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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.
Maybe it's just because you've only really been in the crowds repeating the super low quality criticism but among people who are very much expecting AI to be a big deal it is well known that many benchmarks are saturated and even known which labs are more likely to teach to the test(google and chinese labs are notorious for models that perform very well on benchmarks but fail the vibe check) as it is. Zvi Moskowitz's AI roundup regularly has an "on your marks" section where he goes over the current state of benchmarks. That said, for many benchmarks, like swe-bench, they don't actually just let you run whatever bullshit you want on the test, they run your model themselves using a standardized harness so if the models are cheating on the test then they're doing so by themselves hacking the test, which is interesting in its own right.
That said, there is wide agreement that the best way to determine which model is out front is essentially just to use them and see how they do.
I wonder how hard it would be to put the big four models into some kind of agentic thunderdome, where they all have the same token budget to both solve a problem and fuck over the competition.
I am sleep deprived and fighting off food poisoning, so this might not be a coherent idea.
There's the Vending Machine Bench, where models are competing to keep a virtual business going while making more profit than their competitors.
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