alt Hacker Newshttps://x.com/scaling01 has called out a lot of issues with ARC-AGI-3, some of them (directly copied from tweets, with minimal editing):
- Human baseline is "defined as the second-best first-run human by action count". Your "regular people" are people who signed up for puzzle solving and you don't compare the score against a human average but against the second best human solution
- The scoring doesn't tell you how many levels the models completed, but how efficiently they completed them compared to humans. It uses squared efficiency, meaning if a human took 10 steps to solve it and the model 100 steps then the model gets a score of 1% ((10/100)^2)
- 100% just means that all levels are solvable. The 1% number uses uses completely different and extremely skewed scoring based on the 2nd best human score on each level individually. They said that the typical level is solvable by 6 out of 10 people who took the test, so let's just assume that the median human solves about 60% of puzzles (ik not quite right). If the median human takes 1.5x more steps than your 2nd fastest solver, then the median score is 0.6 * (1/1.5)^2 = 26.7%. Now take the bottom 10% guy, who maybe solves 30% of levels, but they take 3x more steps to solve it. this guy would get a score of 3%
- The scoring is designed so that even if AI performs on a human level it will score below 100%
- No harness at all and very simplistic prompt
- Models can't use more than 5X the steps that a human used
- Notice how they also gave higher weight to later levels? The benchmark was designed to detect the continual learning breakthrough. When it happens in a year or so they will say "LOOK OUR BENCHMARK SHOWED THAT. WE WERE THE ONLY ONES"
Replies
> No harness at all and very simplistic prompt
TBF, that's basically what the kaggle competition is for. Take whatever they do, plug in a SotA LLM and it should do better than whatever people can do with limited GPUs and open models.
It actually makes sense. For any task it is completely trivial for anyone to become better than >80% humans and still easy to be better than >95%. The only problem is motivation not intelligence.
Defining the baseline human is always a bit arbitrary. The median human is illiterate and also dead.
Like other ARC-AGI challenges it was never needed to reach 100% to get human-level. The benchmark score is stretched so that the benchmark takes more time to be saturated, that's it.
The current SotA models are still very far from your hypothetical “average human” with a score of 3%. So the benchmark is indeed useful to help the field progress (which is the entire point of ARC-AGI benchmarks).
If anything this makes the test much harder for the LLM to get high scores and that makes the scores they’re getting all that much more impressive.
"Very simplistic prompt" is the absolute and total core of this and the thing that ensures validity of the whole exercise.
If you are trying to measure GENERAL intelligence then it needs to be general.
Francois here. The scoring metric design choices are detailed in the technical report: https://arcprize.org/media/ARC_AGI_3_Technical_Report.pdf - the metric is meant to discount brute-force attempts and to reward solving harder levels instead of the tutorial levels. The formula is inspired by the SPL metric from robotics navigation, it's pretty standard, not a brand new thing.
We tested ~500 humans over 90 minute sessions in SF, with $115-$140 show up fee (then +$5/game solved). A large fraction of testers were unemployed or under-employed. It's not like we tested Stanford grad students. Many AI benchmarks use experts with Ph.D.s as their baseline -- we hire regular folks as our testers.
Each game was seen by 10 people. They were fully solved (all levels cleared) by 2-8 of them, most of the time 5+. Our human baseline is the second best action count, which is considerably less than an optimal first-play (even the #1 human action count is much less than optimal). It is very achievable, and most people on this board would significantly outperform it.
Try the games yourself if you want to get a sense of the difficulty.
> Models can't use more than 5X the steps that a human used
These aren't "steps" but in-game actions. The model can use as much compute or tools as it wants behind the API. Given that models are scored on efficiency compared to humans, the cutoff makes basically no difference on the final score. The cutoff only exists because these runs are incredibly expensive.
> No harness at all and very simplistic prompt
This is explained in the paper. Quoting: "We see general intelligence as the ability to deal with problems that the system was not specifically designed or trained for. This means that the official leaderboard will seek to discount score increases that come from direct targeting of ARC-AGI-3, to the extent possible."
...
"We know that by injecting a high amount of human instructions into a harness, or even hand-crafting harness configuration choices such as which tools to use, it is possible to artificially increase performance on ARC-AGI-3 (without improving performance on any other domain). The purpose of ARC-AGI-3 is not to measure the amount of human intelligence that went into designing an ARC-AGI-3 specific system, but rather to measure the general intelligence of frontier AI systems.
...
"Therefore, we will focus on reporting the performance of systems that have not been specially prepared for ARC-AGI-3, served behind a general-purpose API (representing developer-aware generalization on a new domain as per (8)). This is similar to looking at the performance of a human test-taker walking into our testing center for the first time, with no prior knowledge of ARC-AGI-3. We know such test takers can indeed solve ARC-AGI-3 environments upon first contact, without prior training, without being briefed on solving strategies, and without using external tools."
If it's AGI, it doesn't need human intervention to adapt to a new task. If a harness is needed, it can make its own. If tools are needed, it can chose to bring out these tools.
Lol basically we're saying AI isn't AI if we utilize the strength of computers (being able to compute). There's no reason why AGI should have to be as "sample efficient" as humans if it can achieve the same result in less time.
Those are supposed to be issues? After reading your list my impression of ARC-AGI has gone up rather than down. All of those things seem like the right way to go about this.