[taormina]

Listen, you can say “but benchmarks, the benchmarks!” all day long, but consumer know when we are being sold a lemon. If it can’t do the most basic of things at least as good as it used to, this is table stakes. Nevermind that if you can’t do the basic stuff, how on earth can you be trusted with more?

[aspenmartin]

And you can say “If it can’t do the most basic of things at least as good as it used to, this is table stakes” all day long while people point you to much better evidence to the contrary too, I’d rather be on the other side of that.

[taormina]

Listen. I don’t care about evidence. I care about my lived experience for the product I paid for. I used the new product. It’s actively terrible. To the point of not being usable. We’re all ancedata, but what is “better evidence to the contrary”? The known and game-able benchmarks that they know they need to win at, so they train it to. It’s all he said, she said, which is the only reason we keep having this conversation.

[aspenmartin]

Yea but it’s not right? You or I or the myriad of other institutions inside and outside of academia can probe these models with an evolving landscape of evaluation sets, even those unavailable to the developers. It’s just ignorance to claim benchmarks are somehow useless or all being gamed. You choose your tools in the way you want, but just don’t call it somehow better than a myriad of more carefully constructed setups and scaled evaluations.