As a PC gamer who grew up in the 00s, this has been something I’ve tried to warn ardent LLM and model enthusiasts about for quite some time.

Benchmarks are handy when they’re new, novel, and constantly changing. The second you let even a single aspect of it stagnate, it becomes a gameable score rather than a useful metric. In PC Gaming, we saw vendors optimize for specific titles, benchmark tools, and scenarios at the expense of general performance, and eventually the industry had a “come to Jesus” moment where we had to collectively decide how to move forward from an industry built on thoroughly gamed benchmarks, with entities like Gamers’ Nexus and Digital Foundry being the end results of that falling out.

LLMs were always going to end up the same way, because the people building the benchmarks - well-intentioned as they were - ultimately fell into the exact same traps with fixed scoring rubrics, known test questions, and believing in some form of “completeness” that could be attained or achieved. The net result are models consistently scoring better on benchmarks but also seeing diminishing returns and rising vulnerabilities, because actual improvement or utility isn’t what they’re being optimized for so much as bragging rights. It’s why there’s so much growing interest in things like MoE execution on unified memory platforms as a means of porting larger models to consumer kit, or ternary models (shoutout to Bonsai) as a means of reducing overall size: both take leading edge, benchmark-saturating models and show that with minimal score loss, they function about as well as frontier models might.

Building a new benchmark won’t solve the problem, either. To move forward, we must evaluate LLMs objectively and with continuously evolving workloads. More “pelican on a bicycle” stuff, but from varying perspectives and use cases. Radiologists putting models through their paces with usable sample data they don’t share with AI labs, or IT folks tasking agents with bootstrapping specific, real-world workloads. To prove general intelligence, we need more specialists evaluating them specifically and generally in ways that are transparent to consumers but difficult or impossible for AI companies to prepare against.

Only then will scoring values matter.