OpenAI launches program to design new ‘domain-specific’ AI benchmarks

OpenAI, like many AI labs, thinks AI benchmarks are broken. It says it wants to fix them through a new program. Called the OpenAI Pioneers Program, the program will focus on creating evaluations for AI models that “set the bar for what good looks like,” as OpenAI phrased it in a blog post. “As the pace of AI adoption accelerates across industries, there is a need to understand and improve its impact in the world,” the company continued in its post. “Creating domain-specific evals are one way to better reflect real-world use cases, helping teams assess model performance in practical, high-stakes environments.” As the recent controversy with the crowdsourced benchmark LM Arena and Meta’s Maverick model illustrate, it’s tough to know, these days, precisely what differentiates one model from another. Many widely-used AI benchmarks measure performance on esoteric tasks, like solving doctorate-level math problems. Others can be gamed, or don’t align well with most people’s preferences. T ... Read full article.