alt Hacker NewsIt makes me wonder about the gaps in evaluating LLMs by benchmarks. There almost certainly is overfitting happening which could degrade other use cases. "In practice" evaluation is what inspired the Chatbot Arena right? But then people realized that Chatbot arena over-prioritizes formatting, and maybe sycophancy(?). Makes you wonder what the best evaluation would be. We probably need lots more task-specific models. That's seemed to be fruitful for improved coding.
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I don’t think benchmark overfitting is as common as people think. Benchmark scores are highly correlated with the subjective “intelligence” of the model. So is pretraining loss.
The only exception I can think of is models trained on synthetic data like Phi.
If the models from the big US labs are being overfit to benchmarks, than we also need to account for HN commenters overfitting positive evaluations to Chinese or European models based on their political biases (US big tech = default bad, anything European = default good).
Also, we should be aware of people cynically playing into that bias to try to advertise their app, like OP who has managed to spam a link in the first line of a top comment on this popular front page article by telling the audience exactly what they want to hear ;)
The best benchmark is one that you build for your use-case. I finally did that for a project and I was not expecting the results. Frontier models are generally "good enough" for most use-cases but if you have something specific you're optimizing for there's probably a more obscure model that just does a better job.