1. Is there a benchmark measuring how much better an LLM performs when you tell it "you are an X"?
2. Does telling an AI agent "you are an AI agent" actually help? Is it the LLM equivalent of reminding a senior developer they're a senior developer, making them feel guilty about being lazy and finally getting them to do their job?
3. What happens when the persona conflicts with the task? If you tell it "you are a PM" and then ask it to write code, does it struggle? Produce worse code? Spawn a sub-agent and tell it they're a developer?
[1] https://artificialanalysis.ai/methodology/intelligence-bench...
That especially the small flash models that are primarily optimized for coding tasks would perform worse at non-coding tasks is not per se surprising to me. The introduction of Terminal-Bench Science 0.1 in particular hurts their aggregate scores [2].
The general question remains of how meaningful aggregating the results of very heterogeneous tasks into a single numeric score is. (Aside from general questions about individual benchmark validity.)
Note: the cyber index is also interesting. While refusals make it somewhat opaque, even if you optimistically count all refusals for Opus and Fable as successes, the results are ... fascinating [3].
I'll add that I really want to know how Opus 4.x and Codex 5.x perform on the new index. Once we have that information, this is going to give us a better understanding of how meaningful the scores are.
[1] https://artificialanalysis.ai/#coding-agents-tabs
[2] https://artificialanalysis.ai/evaluations/terminal-bench-sci...
edit to add: there totally is benchmaxxing going on, but I'd be really surprised if it wasn't across the board. After all, how can any lab tell if their model has improved over a previous iteration, if not by comparing benchmark performance?
It is hard to tell what people are trying to say when they use undefined words with no particular meaning. This doesn't seem to change the relative position of the Chinese models much. The Chinese are a month or few behind and the state of intelligence is so volatile that the top 10 will be completely different in 6 months. I'd expect it to still be a mix of US and Chinese models with the US models leading.
As long as that's the case, it's no surprise that there is often a perceived difference of quality between benchmarks and real-world use.
I know that running the full composite benchmark set is probably already quite costly, and also that the benchmarks have to be rotated regularly, but it feels like a significant untackled problem.
The current placement of many models simply doesn't makes sense, GLM 5.3 is so much better than Astra at backend tasks, Astra does the most weird nonsensical bugs.
This is what happens when the benchmark team is funded by VC capital.
Why are they using a closed source LLM as a judge? Closed source providers can see your traffic and adjust as they see fit.
One thing I’m still surprised / unsure on is haiku 5.5 max besting latest deepseek - but also I think the last haiku was so incredibly bad I still hold some bias whilst using the new one.
The score hit on smaller models is a welcome change especially when compared to models that nearly 10 times larger.
Grok being punished quite a lot is also a very welcome change as the model is frankly not that good.
I would love to see few more points knocked off haiku by introducing steerability/creativity benchmarks.
One of the new benchmarks is FrontierCode 2.0 by Cognition. AA seems to have accepted Cognition's benchmark scores without questioning, but they should have looked more closely.
On this benchmark, Anthropic's models are run using Claude Code; OpenAI's using Codex, and Gemini is run using... Cognition's own Devin (not Antigravity). Thus its score is much lower than it should be, knocking ~3 points off its AA score. All open-source models are also inexplicably run using Devin, damaging their scores as well.
This may even be intentional, if Cognition has beef with Google, since Antigravity was built using Windsurf's technology. But aside from that, it is to their advantage to make Anthropic/OAI look like leaders in the AI market. They are a company known to lie and exaggerate again and again, so I have trouble giving them benefit of the doubt.
[1] https://artificialanalysis.ai/evaluations/frontiercode-2-0
It's interesting that the Stirrup scores are somewhat close to the specialized harness scores. Either Stirrup is quite excellent or is it that harness doesn't matter so much after a point?
I would think it's the opposite as a more competitive frontier for llms makes the labs shed some margins and enable a broader ecosystem.
Additionally: competitive frontier = more commodified = high valuations under more scrutiny.
AAv5.0: 25% Knowledge work: AA-Briefcase v1.1 - 15% AutomationBench-AA - 5% GDP.pdf - 5% (-5%) 25% Coding: FrontierCode 2.0 - 15% (new) Terminal-Bench4.0 - 10% 25% Science: Terminal-Bench Science .1- 15% (new) CritPt v2 (hard subset) - 10% (new version) 25% General: AA-Omniscience v1.1 - 15% HLE-Diamond - 10%
AAv4.3: 30% Agents: AA-Briefcase v1.1 - 15% GDPval-AA v2 - 10% AutomationBench-AA - 5% 20% Coding: Terminal-Bench4.0 - 10% SciCode - 10% 30% General: AA-Omniscience (Accuracy) - 10% AA-Omniscience (Non-hallucination) - 5% GDP.pdf - 10% AA-LCR v1.1 - 5% 20% Scientific Reasoning: HLE - 10% CritPt 10%
tldr: gained Terminal-Bench Science and FrontierCode, dropped SciCode, GDPval-AA and AA-LCR. Lowered weight of GDP.pdf.