5.3 codex https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-5-3-codex/ crushes with a 77.3% in Terminal Bench. The shortest lived lead in less than 35 minutes. What a time to be alive!
Dumb question. Can these benchmarks be trusted when the model performance tends to vary depending on the hours and load on OpenAI’s servers? How do I know I’m not getting a severe penalty for chatting at the wrong time. Or even, are the models best after launch then slowly eroded away at to more economical settings after the hype wears off?
It is a fair question. I'd expect the numbers are all real. Competitors are going to rerun the benchmark with these models to see how the model is responding and succeeding on the tasks and use that information to figure out how to improve their own models. If the benchmark numbers aren't real their competitors will call out that it's not reproducible.
However it's possible that consumers without a sufficiently tiered plan aren't getting optimal performance, or that the benchmark is overfit and the results won't generalize well to the real tasks you're trying to do.