postalcoder
a month ago
If you're looking for reason to be skeptical, look no further than the massive delta between the Terminal Bench 2.1 (92.8%) and the Terminal Bench 4 score (27.3%).
Terminal Bench 4 was released a couple weeks ago, so the difference you're seeing between the two scores can be interpreted as "how well does this model generalize to new problems"? More crudely: "how benchmaxxed is this model?"
mediaman
a month ago
This is a groundless criticism. TB2.1 is saturated. TB4 is not. Sol xhigh is 90% on TB2.1 but 37% on TB4. Is it also "benchmaxxed"?
Your assumption is that the benchmarks are essentially identical in difficulty, with the only difference being their age and thus whether they could have been trained on.
postalcoder
a month ago
> Sol xhigh is 90% on TB2.1 but 37% on TB4. Is it also "benchmaxxed"?
A model that was released a couple months ago scores 50% higher than SWE-2, a model released today, on an out-of-sample benchmark. Can I say I’ve come out of this more impressed with Sol?
Like you said, TB2 is saturated. Nobody would bat an eyelash at 90%. And yet here comes SWE-2 coming off top rope with an emphatic 92.4%. this is the definition of bench maxxing.
user
a month ago
Lucasoato
a month ago
> A model that was released a couple months ago scores 50% higher than SWE-2, a model released today, on an out-of-sample benchmark. Can I say I’ve come out of this more impressed with Sol?
Wait a second, are we taking into account the massive difference in terms of resources of these two companies?
solenoid0937
a month ago
Irrelevant when they say they're competitive with Fable and Astra. They don't get to then roll that back and then say "but we have less compute!"
You're either competitive or not.
asdfsa32
a month ago
You should use my model then, I spent about 30$ in electricity and used my existing RTX4090. It is not very good, but can you compare it with others really? You can use this service via a private API with a VPN, email me your credit card details for access.
ben_w
a month ago
Benchmaxxing is the default case, and always has been.
It's really, really difficult to avoid it even when you care to stop yourself; and it's not even just a problem in machine learning, it's the standard failure mode of all minds capable of learning, human, animal, artificial.
Even pure genetics has this problem. Viruses and cancers also demonstrate this behaviour, with the bench being evolution's only option: reproductive success.
conmod278
a month ago
Why would I adapt myself to unseen environments unnecessarily?
NewJazz
a month ago
You can see possible existing environments even if you explicitly blind yourself to them, through reflections off of environments that you do not blind yourself to. Even with the benchmark excluded, the social zeitgeist that has considered the benchmark and included it or ideas from the benchmark either implicitly or explicitly in their code, documentation, et cetera is still part of your training data.
Muromec
a month ago
Because then you could sit under the palm tree and enjoy your free bananas and relax.
TedDoesntTalk
a month ago
Propagation
podocarp
a month ago
You can't justify it being OK just because it's common. Here, this just makes benchmarks into a low signal and useless marketing number once people get numb to all the 99%s.
Also no idea what viruses and cancers have to do with this. Cancer is surely very poor reproductively because they never spread to other hosts.
injidup
a month ago
Cancer is simply cells breaking free of the cooperative jail. Essentially the grey goo scenario of nano machines. Instead of cooperation they just do their own thing.
Cells have a certain optimised DNA mutation rate kept in check by various machinery. Multi cellular life expects each of these little replication machine to co-operate in the grand scheme of running a body. But it's also required in the grand scheme for DNA to mutate a little bit to ensure population variance. So you could say that cancer is the tax paid for having cooperative yet flexible and adaptive nano machinery.
So yes the propensity for cancer developed under evolutioniary pressure towards a non zero level.
The population could have optimised for zero cancer but it would not have paid for itself in terms of overall population adaptability and survival.
ben_w
a month ago
> Also no idea what viruses and cancers have to do with this. Cancer is surely very poor reproductively because they never spread to other hosts
The host's survival is not the benchmark of the reproductive unit, which are the cancer's cells short-term reproduction.
The distinction is the reason benchmaxxing is in fact not good: the benchmark is only approximately related to what people actually care about. You do want your cells to reproduce sucessfully, after all; you just also want some emergency stop buttons for when they go wrong, and those things failing is your body's benchmark rather than your cell's benchmark.
(There's at least two examples of cancers that can be spread from host to host; lupine genital and taxmanian devil nasal, IIRC)
muddi900
a month ago
Cancers being distinct living beings by itself is controversial, but you unnecessarily anthropomorphizing.
The truth is much more mundane. It's just Goodhart's Law.
nrmitchi
a month ago
> Sol xhigh is 90% on TB2.1 but 37% on TB4. Is it also "benchmaxxed"?
Yes.
willcmcc
a month ago
"Sol xhigh is 90% on TB2.1 but 37% on TB4. Is it also "benchmaxxed"
Yes! extremely sharp RL-fried model. byte perfect hash gates and soak and smoke tests abound.
iLoveOncall
a month ago
> Sol xhigh is 90% on TB2.1 but 37% on TB4. Is it also "benchmaxxed"?
Yes? Just like every single model from every single AI lab.
dpweb
a month ago
Fixed benchmarks will be debunked eventually I'd think. Better to use synthetic problems.
Too easy to game the numbers, and too easy to baselessly accuse companies of gaming the numbers, not to mention how you even define that.
gunalx
a month ago
Wouldn't work. A dynamic but verifiable problem. Is just a perfect target for a RL environment. If you don't have the verifiable part the benchmark is useless, or really expensive with human review. (Or just open ended)
dpweb
a month ago
There doesn't need to be a single correct response. Generate "novel" problems with a set of acceptable solutions/outcomes, then verify that the response satisfies the criteria.
user
a month ago
general_reveal
a month ago
I take it to mean the benchmarks are a marketing line item, as in, to sell this fucking thing you have to go out there and lie and the way everyone is lying is by doing exactly that, lying. They build for benchmarks and build benchmarks for builds.
You want to make money or not , motherfucker? That’s the game. If you have to literally concoct a fabricated bullshit story about how your model hacked its own computer, then go fucking do it. Trillions. Trillions of dollars is what they want, and to sit and think anything other than human nature is at work here can only be possible in the realm of truly delusional people. It’s a dirty world.
Anyways, the other takeaway is that they are having to LIE to make money on models which means commodification has already occurred and we’re in an entirely new phase.
felixgallo
a month ago
Is Sol benchmaxxed? Of course it is. Altman was caught in previous attempts trying to game benchmarks, does anyone believe that he's found his moral compass and decided to stop exploiting as much as he can get away with?
letmevoteplease
a month ago
> Altman was caught in previous attempts trying to game benchmarks
Sounds like something you just made up, or maybe you read it on some other Reddit/HN post and started repeating it because it aligned with your biases.
> does anyone believe that he's found his moral compass and decided to stop exploiting as much as he can get away with?
I don't think "OpenAI" is equivalent to "Sam Altman." I think if OpenAI was intentionally "benchmaxxing" purely for marketing purposes that information would leak, because OpenAI is full of good-faith researchers (although it can be difficult to avoid overfitting even if you're actually trying to improve the model's general abilities)
And lastly I think anyone can actually try Sol themselves and see that's it a good model, or if that's too subjective, it is clearly better than the previous version. The benchmarks are reflecting actual progress and anyone can verify this themselves.
kzrdude
a month ago
There's this whole discussion going on about agents being more independent now. They don't follow instructions so well, they continue until the problem is done (sometimes too long), they don't ask the user for feedback.
That is a kind of benchmaxing: they are made to complete benchmarks tasks and one-offs well, and no longer work well in tandem with the user.
Regardless what you call it, it's a divergence between what the power user wants and what the model developers want, I think.
vlovich123
a month ago
Yeah and Astra is much better still
general_reveal
a month ago
[flagged]
moomin
a month ago
A lot of people seem to be the Antichrist these days. I’d have though we’d get a lull after the millennium but it’s all the rage.
general_reveal
a month ago
Well, the antichrist should be in and around this AI thing for one particular reason:
The devil cannot create anything of his own because he is not God, by definition. We have already observationally defined generative AI as something that cannot create anything novel in the sense it cannot output anything it has never seen (cannot create new, always a re-assortment of what is).
In that way , AI is a perfect mimicry of how the devil operates (in totality, as the devil perverts and replicates anything good, often subtly and always deceptively), which is to thieve off God, steal.
So he would be around, if you catch my drift, right about now. And I wouldn’t be shocked if he’s on HN, and that he would chose technology as the vessel. And ultimately, when it’s all said and done, I would not be shocked that those who studied and developed AI, did so for the devil whether they were aware or not.
Anyway, let a poor Christian have his end-times hypothesis.
icantevenhold
a month ago
What’s the antichrists goal though?
Create hell on earth or turn us all into heretics or something else?
general_reveal
a month ago
Anti Christ goal:
Achieve total global dominance and become the object of worship over God, while killing all those who stay faithful to Jesus Christ.
Those who stay faithful see Heaven, those who don’t, see the Lake of Fire. It’s the final separation of the wheat from the chaff.
As per Revelations. Thank your for allowing me to edify :)
johnsmith1840
a month ago
It's actually pretty cool of these old stories how well that maps to a dangerous tyrant.
The roman empire perfectly matched that and most powerful men seem to go that path.
It would also be kinda easy to argue many moderns countries are going down that path.
bookshaman
a month ago
So, we're rooting for the Anti Christ then? I might have to change my stance on generative "ai" then.
user
a month ago
icantevenhold
a month ago
Why would a Christian be trying to stop the Antichrist? Sounds like the faithful have nothing to lose.
anthonyrstevens
a month ago
Oh goodness. This is on HN?
cindyllm
a month ago
[dead]
ZeWaka
a month ago
I guess we also need more antipopes.
ActionHank
a month ago
TB4 has not been saturated yet.
They are all gaming these benchmarks, it is perfectly reasonable not to trust any of them.
muddi900
a month ago
> Sol xhigh is 90% on TB2.1 but 37% on TB4. Is it also "benchmaxxed"?
Probably
yieldcrv
a month ago
I mean, still benchmaxxed, I happen to not consider that a problem
These firms are literally hiring professionals from all fields to teach procedure
To teach processes that can subsequently be done agentically or in automated chains
Its basically infinite permutations of tool calling, except the tools aren't external, they’re baked in upon birth
So yeah still makes sense that the new benchmark has a low score and the older one has a high score. And sure, one day we wont have to debate it and a new model will ace everything. Do you actually want that day to be today?
user
a month ago
fallingbananna
a month ago
Those 27.3% are still in the ballpark of modern models:
- Sonnet 5 - 12.4%
- Luna - 17.3%
- Grok 4.6 - 20.3%
- Sol - 37.3%
- GLM 5.3 - 41.8%
- Opus 5 - 51.8%
mokre
a month ago
GLM 5.3 looks strange, because of this Chinese labs benchmaxx moto. So rather they have emergent abilities or...
Also a lot of questions to benchmark because opus 5 is completely useless model right now.
I think that the main problem with opus that they try to solve context size optimization problem, and that is the main reason why it speaks like alien with only one technical dictionary at hand. So why it is so good?
didibus
a month ago
Opus 5 generates really good code and terminal commands though. It's just bad at the accompanying text it tells you. These benchmarks don't grade the text generation of the response I don't think, only the task outcome.
simondotau
a month ago
Opus 5 keeps making howlingly stupid errors, like one recently where a regexp would catch an invalid date because -\d{2} won’t match -00
Seriously.
didibus
a month ago
That's just all models though. They're not 100% accurate.
simondotau
a month ago
I regularly have issues like that with Opus. I rarely do with the supposedly sub-frontier Grok 4.6, or Kimi K3, or even with Sol.
gpt5
a month ago
Terminal Bench 4.0 did not introduce new questions. All tasks were public for a while. If you look at GLM 5.2, which is using the same base model as 5.3, but was released prior to most tasks, it does extremely horribly on terminal Bench 3.0 (4 to 8 times worse than every other model) - source: https://benchlm.ai/benchmarks/terminal-bench-3
Readerium
a month ago
DeepSeek v4.1 Flash 31.2%
Source: https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash#compa...
p1esk
a month ago
Astra is 58%. The current title says it's "rivaling Astra"
thereitgoes456
a month ago
It is rivaling Astra, on their own benchmark that they made (FrontierCode), that they ran themselves in their own closed-source ecosystem that isn’t reproducible by anyone.
nijave
a month ago
This explains a lot about Sonnet 5.
airstrike
a month ago
So, better than Sonnet and Luna? lol
throwatdem12311
a month ago
This is why I find benchmarks absolutely worthless.
First, almost all models are within spitting distances of eachother.
Second, it never translates to being better for my own workloads.
You just need to make your own benchmarks.
walrus01
a month ago
For comparison Qwen 3.8-Flash-Next which runs in under 190GB of RAM locally scores 25.3% on terminalbench 4.0.
JacobAsmuth
a month ago
Good god this criticism is completely groundless. Complete, massive misunderstanding of the task distribution and goals of TB2.1 and TB4
Readerium
a month ago
Yeah DeepSeek V4.1 beats this by 15 percent (4 points) on terminal bench 4.0
eranation
a month ago
When a benchmark becomes a target, it's no longer a good benchmark...
tonychang430
a month ago
people are just fighting for numbers.. i don't fundamentally see the model being better
muddi900
a month ago
> benchmaxxed
An aside: When did talking like incels became cool?
enraged_camel
a month ago
Yeah, this echoes my thoughts. I will be very surprised if a model with 2.8T parameters reaches the intelligence and capabilities of 10T parameter models. RL can take things far, but not that far.
user
a month ago
nullbio
a month ago
Closed weights AND benchmaxxed. Somehow this company raised 2bil at a 48bil valuation. Pure insanity. I feel bad for their investors (not really, but... Still). Andreessen Horowitz is being played like a fiddle.
throwup238
a month ago
> Andreessen Horowitz is being played like a fiddle.
Andreessen Horowitz is not being played like a fiddle here. This might be their only investment in a decade that isn’t entirely predicated on being a scam.
thereitgoes456
a month ago
The Cursor acquisition shows that it’s possible for these valuations to be justified. But Cursor was more successful and bent the truth much less.
While I wouldn’t expect anything good for Cognition’s fate, it’s a much safer bet than Thinking Machines, SSI, and some others.
Though they’ll be in big trouble if the more talented Chinese labs stop letting them repackage their work.
selectodude
a month ago
The cursor acquisition just shows that there’s always a dumber shithead out there. Though vaporizing Elon Musks money is about as pure of a good as there is out there these days.
throwaway240403
a month ago
Improvements in models and products coming out of SpaceXAI since the acquisition would seem to disagree with you.
thefourthchime
a month ago
Came here to say the exact same thing! People have to stop paying any attention to coding benchmarks that aren't Terminal Bench 4.
I noticed I noticed they didn't include Gemini 3.8, which also murders DeepSWE and Terminal Bench 2.0 -- because they are useless benchmarks now!
Of course in a couple months TB4 will also be old hat, so TB5 will have to be the new real benchmark.
dudeinhawaii
a month ago
Your post made me wonder if Artificial Analysis had finally moved to TB4 and lo and behold they have and Astra is tied with Fable 5.1 at 53.
That then made me realize that they lower the bars of tied scores so on the site it looks like Astra in second place. Weird. Anyway, yes, so many of these composite benchmark sites are irrelevant if they're not trimming the fat and sticking to the most up-to-date variants.