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Comment by amelius

2 days ago

Aren't good benchmarks supposed to be secret?

This industry is currently burning billions a month. With that much money around I don't think any secrets can exist.

How can a benchmark be secret if you post it to an API to test a model on it?

"We totally promise that when we run your benchmark against our API we won't take the data from it and use to be better at your benchmark next time"

:P

If you want to do it properly you have to avoid any 3rd party hosted model when you test your benchmark, which means you can't have GPT5, claude, etc. on it; and none of the benchmarks want to be 'that guy' who doesn't have all the best models on it.

So no.

They're not secret.

  • How do you propose that would work? A pipeline that goes through query-response pairs to deduce response quality and then uses the low-quality responses for further training? Wouldn't you need a model that's already smart enough to tell that previous model's responses weren't smart enough? Sounds like a chicken and egg problem.

    • It just means that once you send your test questions to a model API, that company now has your test. So 'private' benchmarks take it on faith that the companies won't look at those requests and tune their models or prompts to beat them.

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