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Terminal-Bench-Science: Evaluating AI agents on scientific research workflows

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11–20 of 43 posts

Re: Terminal-Bench-Science: Evaluating AI agents on scientific research workflows

#12
I got pretty good mileage out of context engineering, adding my personal coding heuristics to my AGENTS.md and referencing subdocuments on a "when doing X, consult Y" pattern. I assume others are doing similar things, but I was pretty surprised when I was able to get it to generate code that is pretty close to what I would do if I was doing it manually. I'm curious if scientists and mathematicians are doing things like that. "When I see X, I typically immediately check Y" or whatever their domain heuristics look like.

Re: Terminal-Bench-Science: Evaluating AI agents on scientific research workflows

#13
post #11

Damn. These things aren't AGI... but I don't care. Luna is good enough for me to give a parser spec and have it write one.

How is an llm parser_spec to parser better than something like lex?

Because sometimes parsers can have weird inputs, like structured Excel files

Re: Terminal-Bench-Science: Evaluating AI agents on scientific research workflows

#14
Like you were reading my mind. I was waiting for such benchmark to land. This will improve models for such scientific research workflows.

AI should have started with science from the beginning, not after 4 years.

I am building on top of it with agents to improve scientific workflows.

Re: Terminal-Bench-Science: Evaluating AI agents on scientific research workflows

#15
post #7

The fact that opus 5 is outperforming fable is odd to me From personal experience, opus 5 feels net inferior to fable on almost every aspect (for coding tasks)

IMHO it's roughly task depth (fable) vs breadth (opus). Fable is great at tracing and debugging sometimes, but otherwise shorthand for confabulation. It's persistent but ungovernable, struggles to switch contexts, and goes insane with too much freedom to explore. Don't point it at anything that looks like a "system" for actual work (but mapping or planning might be ok). Opus is maybe not as creative, but it's more stable and more trustworthy. Opus driving Fable could be awesome, but Fable unleashed/unsupervised on longer horizon tasks or things that require more methodical changes on lots of components seems like a disaster every time I try it.

Since this kind of thing is always down to harness, project-type, and other structural constraints, of course your mileage may vary. Fable is probably great for pen-testing, or as a decision-making kernel of other kinds of applications, and way better than Opus at those things. Probably fine for code-review or changing a codebase of a few thousand lines in any language. Actually building that codebase or changing an even bigger one? Woof.

How this fits in with science? IDK but I bet other existing causal reasoning benchmarks might tell the whole story and this is back to stability again. Sometimes having a smart idea is really important! But more often it's important to just not forget what you were doing. What was I talking about? Oh look a squirrel

Re: Terminal-Bench-Science: Evaluating AI agents on scientific research workflows

#17

Not surprised to see Claude significantly higher in scientific intelligence than Sol. You can tell that Claude really does grasp a wide array of highly specific scientific and mathematical nuances... where's codex is just basically for coding and that's it. That's the feel I get from the both of them anyways and I've used both on the 20x plan for the past week at length. Don't get me wrong, codex is great at finding…

> You can tell that Claude really does grasp a wide array of highly specific scientific and mathematical nuances... where's codex is just basically for coding and that's it.

If you have time, can you elaborate or give some examples of mathematical nuances?

I am evaluating Sol and Fable on a fairly large dataset of subtly flawed informal mathematical arguments (task is to identify and name propositions with substantially incorrect proofs in a larger body of text), and Sol is saturating the benchmark, while Fable is below 50% even with the most generous grading.

I don't work in the natural sciences, so I suspect you mean something different by "mathematical nuance".

Re: Terminal-Bench-Science: Evaluating AI agents on scientific research workflows

#18

I wonder how long it's going to be before self improvement encompasses hardware and materials science, not just code. It's exciting, soon we'll be able to fully hand off scientific, mathematical, and technical progress over to the machines, and then we can fully lay back.

I love it when people handwave tech developments of a truly gargantuan scale

Re: Terminal-Bench-Science: Evaluating AI agents on scientific research workflows

#20

Like you were reading my mind. I was waiting for such benchmark to land. This will improve models for such scientific research workflows. AI should have started with science from the beginning, not after 4 years. I am building on top of it with agents to improve scientific workflows.

>AI should have started with science from the beginning, not after 4 years.

DeepMind has entered the chat.

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