Posted by dcastm 6 hours ago
aren't some LLM going to digest that thread at some point and indirectly learn from it?
basically my point is originally this was a good benchmark because it was an absurd never-seen-before thing, but now that it is in content, some models are going to get a benefit in education?
you'd need the "AI" equivalent of an old-school "google whack", something with no previous results
It is the reinforcement learning that produces more tangible results with less data, but it is something that the AI labs specifically selects and it is not picked up unknowingly
Since the tests can be generally gamed with directing descriptions at it non-deterministically, there's a greater chance the questions solution can be found.
Of course, hopefully the models are instead adding patterns and types of questions as well and it makes the models more capable, but it may be limited in how it transfers to other types of questions in breadth or depth.
I think we should stop using pelican benchmark.
> Every single one is a pelican, on a bicycle, first try. When every student gets an A, the exam has stopped grading.
Numerous pelicans and their bikes are clearly horribly malformed. In fact none of the bike frames are correct. Fable and Opus come close, but the top of the diamond is disconnected in Fable's case and the head tube is misaligned with the front fork in Opus's case.
And of course, as the parent post shows, labs don't actually seem to be training on the pelican bike case.
The problem isn't the test, its that is a public test.
Simon has previously said he has a list of secret prompts (at least one of which he "burned" as a demonstration a while ago). That's what makes it a good test - his commentary on the public test is something of a proxy for non-public tests. This makes it a good benchmark.
Test the LLLM against things you want it to do.
Asking questions that are absurd is like interviewing developers and asking absurd questions on the grounds that it tests creative and critical thinking.
Remember these Microsoft interview questions designed to identify the best developers?
"If you could eliminate one U.S. state, which one would it be?"
"How would you move Mount Fuji?"
Absurd interview questions have an air of legitimacy due to the quasi sophisticated justifications put forward for why they are good tests.
Absurd interview questions are not good tests of people or LLMs.
Relevant questions are good tests.
Yes; what's wrong with that?
Do you suppose that it doesn't test those qualities?
Yes, deliberately so.
It was never intended as a meaningful benchmark. The surprising thing was that for the first ~12 months performance on the stupid pelican benchmark did seem to correspond to the performance of the models on other tasks.
That pattern no longer holds - Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 have both been out-pelicaned by lesser models now.
What sufficiently hard, but useful, problem would you ask the model for?
I agree, it is ridiculous to ask an LLM to replace an artist.
"Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes."
Or the more pop layman version
"When a measure becomes a metric/KPI, it ceases to be a good measure."
Story time, I live in Argentina, and we don't have Big Macs, the main Mc Donald's brand, here, because during the CFK presidency, one of her tactics was to Goodhart economic metrics. Even the informal obscure ones like the [Big Mac Index](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Mac_Index), I don't know the precise details, but the Big Mac ended up being a very cheap item, like 2 or 3 times cheaper than actual menu items, but it was never on the advertised menu, and it also ended up being very small compared to the other burgers, so it wasn't even like a hack, a shrinkflation type of deal.
But hey, anyone who read the Big Mac Index table would never find Argentina at the bottom of that list along with a couple of other countries with bad brands, so the ploy worked. And now we live with the aftershock, the brand never really turned around, other brands with ridiculous names took over it like the McTasty, which makes me sound like that skit from Tarantino's Pulp Fiction.