Artificial Analysis v5 and the benchmarker's dilemma

Hill-climbing is easy, knowing what to hill-climb is hard. Making scores go up is expensive, but we have a much clearer playbook for it than we do for creating meaningful benchmarks at the true frontier of AI today.Independent evaluation of language models is under-appreciated in how hard of a task it is. These groups are not just taking current models and certifying their scores, which is a technically involved task. This is their job if AI progress is slow. When AI progress is as fast as it is, the technical details of the job are the routine work part of trying to put a single number on what makes for a good AI model today. The goal is to have a single number that is representative of current models, matching vibe checks, community sentiment, and scientific analysis, while being forward looking enough so that it’s not outdated in 3 months.Everyone building a benchmark faces a sort of paradox. You need your benchmark to reduce to one single number, so that it is easy to discuss, use in reports, and compare models, but every method of aggregating scores comes with meaningful trade-offs. The best scientists need to do this, everyone does. It’s a matter of creating aggregation metrics that you think are most fair, knowing there will always be imperfections.With the amount of money in the AI ecosystem today, the weight of independent evaluation is even higher – you dictate the winners and losers of a trillion dollar market. You also influence some of the models themselves, steering the shape of progress. This is a lot of pressure!My prompt for this article is Artificial Analysis’s recent update to their Intelligence Index, v5. The AA index is the most prominent independent intelligence metric for the latest frontier models, followed in a distant second by Epoch AI’s Capabilities Index (ECI). To date, all of these have been incredibly useful for the community and massively flawed!Interconnects AI is a reader-supported publication. Consider becoming a subscriber.Language models are capable of so much today, and this scope of capabilities is growing quickly. Our era of singular intelligence indices should be phased out soon, but it will take a long time.A summary of AAv5 is below, from their blog post, where they describe it as “reflecting real-world usage today:”Intelligence Index v5 weights:➤ Knowledge Work (25%): AA-Briefcase (15%), AutomationBench-AA (5%), and GDP.pdf (5%)➤ Coding (25%): FrontierCode 2.0 (15%) and Terminal-Bench 4.0 (10%)➤ Science (25%): Terminal-Bench-Science (15%) and CritPt v2 hard subset (10%)➤ General (25%): AA-Omniscience v1.1 15% (10% accuracy, 5% non-hallucination) and HLE-Diamond (10%)Here’s the new ranking of models:The problem with trying to benchmark real-world usage today is that it is extremely jagged, just like the models. The most proven use-case is coding, where open models are far more competitive and likely to keep up. In knowledge work, I’m less confident in open models.At first glance, in aggregate, their model ranking definitely looks reasonable. Still, it shows signs of strain and confusion, as any benchmark will, with GPT 6.1 Terra beating Claude Fable 5.1 on AAv5. Today, some benchmarks measure the absolute frontier of capabilities, playing nicely in open-ended tasks through your favorite harness, which often does take a large model. Some other benchmarks measure certain skills that will be needed of a model in repetitive agentic tasks. I get the feeling that AA is tuning their benchmark more towards the former, a general agentic collaborator, but all of these behaviors overlap.This takes us to the plot going around that prompted me to write this, where they showed the balance of open vs. closed models on the new benchmark. This plot shows 8 closed models beating the best to-be open-weight model, Kimi K3.1 Pro (which isn’t colored blue). This benchmark is taking the opinion of trying to measure where frontier models are moving into, which grows the gap to open models. This is an okay decision to take, but over time as existing workflows of open models become key factors of the economy, it could become a benchmark that misses where the core economic engine of the industry is.Open models’ demise from this seems greatly exaggerated, but I do think the previous index was flattering the open weight models too strongly. Consider this plot from the Kimi K3.1 Pro launch — yes, the open models are strong and useful in some cases, but the best OpenAI and Anthropic models have been a major step ahead in their flexibility and reliability.Some of the evaluations in AAv5 that open models