[teiferer]

> This is...just incredibly conspiratorial and a bit silly.

Do you think? Have you seen the insane valuations at which the AI companies are going to do their IPOs? They surely leave no idea off the table when hundreds of billions of USD are on the line. You could even say they'd be negligent if they'd not at least explore those avenues.

[aspenmartin]

They don't have control over measurement. Consider also it's easy to figure this out and it creates a scandal. Like I said, consider Llama 4 which a lot of people pointed out used a custom model in LMArena to inflate their scores; its never clear what the true underlying story for this, but regardless that model release spurred billions of dollars of spending on new talent and a complete gutting of that org.

These companies have to care about good measurement frameworks because the quality of their models depends on it. Any PR department can polish a turd, but an army of smart researchers far outside the control of these companies are going to figure it out if they are gaming metrics.