Comment by cycomanic

It's typically difficult to find direct evidence for bias. That is why rules for conflict of interest and disclosure are strict in research and academia. Crucially, something is a conflict of interest if it could be perceived as a conflict of interest by someone external, so it doesn't matter if you think you could judge fairly, it's important if someone else might doubt you could.

Not disclosing a conflict of interest is generally considered a significant ethics violation, because it reduces trust in the general scientific/research system. Thus OpenAI has become untrustworthy in many people's view irrespective if their involvement with the benchmarks creation affected their results or not.