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FrontierMath was funded by OpenAI

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Re: FrontierMath was funded by OpenAI

#91

Post by EagnaIonat »

aithrowawaycomm wrote: post #15
lolinder wrote: post #10

A co-founder of Epoch left a note in the comments: > We acknowledge that OpenAI does have access to a large fraction of FrontierMath problems and solutions, with the exception of a unseen-by-OpenAI hold-out set that enables us to independently verify model capabilities. However, we have a verbal agreement that these materials will not be used in model training. Ouch. A verbal agreement. As the saying goes, those aren…

What's even more suspicious is that these tweets from Elliot Glazer indicate that they are still "developing" the hold-out set, even though elsewhere Epoch AI strongly implied this already existed: https://xcancel.com/ElliotGlazer/status/1880809468616950187 It seems to me that o3's 25% benchmark score is 100% data contamination.

> What's even more suspicious is that these tweets from Elliot Glazer indicate that they are still "developing" the hold-out set,

There is nothing suspicious about this and the wording seems to be incorrect.

A hold-out set is a percentage of the overall data that is used to test a model. It is just not trained on it. Model developers normally have full access to it.

There is nothing inherently wrong with training on a full/partial hold out set. It just means you have done a different split to train again.

The confusion I see here is that people are equating a hold out set to a blind set. That's a set of data to test against that the model developers (and model) cannot see.

Even so blind sets can also go stale after a few runs and nothing is wrong with ingesting that blind set, as long as you have a new blind set to run against.

Trying to game blind set tests is nothing new and it gets very quickly found out.

What I took from the original article is that the blind set is likely unbalanced and it answered more easier questions than hard ones.

Re: FrontierMath was funded by OpenAI

#92

Post by AyyEye »

cma wrote: post #75
aithrowawaycomm wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's even more suspicious is that these tweets from Elliot Glazer indicate that they are still "developing" the hold-out set, even though elsewhere Epoch AI strongly implied this already existed: https://xcancel.com/ElliotGlazer/status/1880809468616950187 It seems to me that o3's 25% benchmark score is 100% data contamination.

> I just saw Sam Altman speak at YCNYC and I was impressed. I have never actually met him or heard him speak before Monday, but one of his stories really stuck out and went something like this: > "We were trying to get a big client for weeks, and they said no and went with a competitor. The competitor already had a terms sheet from the company were we trying to sign up. It was real serious. > We were devastated, but…

Nothing says genuine like lying to get a contract.

Re: FrontierMath was funded by OpenAI

#93

Post by EvgeniyZh »

refulgentis wrote: post #19

Its increasingly odd to see HN activity that assumes the premise: if the latest benchmark results involved a benchmark that can be shown to have any data that OpenAI could have accessed, then, the benchmark results were intentionally faked. Last time this confused a bunch of people who didn't understand what test vs. train data meant and it resulted in a particular luminary complaining on Twitter, to much guffaws, ho…

Why wouldn't OpenAI cheat? It's an open secret in industry that benchmarks are trained on. Everybody does it, so you need to do that or else your similarly performing model will look worse on paper.

And even they respect the agreement, even using test set as a validation set can be a huge advantage. That's why validation set and test set are two different terms with precise meaning.

As for "knowing it's bad", most people won't be able to tell a model scoring 25% and 10% apart. People who are using these models to solve math problems are tiny share of users and even tinier share of revenues. What OpenAI needs is to convince investors that there is still progress in capabilities going at high pace, and gaming the benchmarks makes perfect sense in this context. 25% was surprising and appeared to surpass expectations, which is exactly what OpenAI needs.

Re: FrontierMath was funded by OpenAI

#94

Post by mlsu »

ripped_britches wrote: post #82

Do people actually think OpenAI is gaming benchmarks? I know they have lost trust and credibility, especially on HN. But this is a company with a giant revenue opportunity to sell products that work. What works for enterprise is very different from “does it beat this benchmark”. No matter how nefarious you think sama is, everything points to “build intelligence as rapidly as possible” rather than “spin our wheels mes…

Gaming benchmarks has a lot of utility for openAI whether their product works or not.

Many people compare models based on benchmarks. So if openAI can appear better to Anthropic, Google, or Meta, by gaming benchmarks, it's absolutely in their interest to do so, especially if their product is only slightly behind, because evaluating model quality is very very tricky business these days.

In particular, if there is a new benchmark, it's doubly in their interest to game it, because they know that other providers will start using and optimizing performance towards that benchmark, in order to "beat" OpenAI and win market share.

On a personal level, their model is getting beat handily by Claude Sonnet 3.5 right now. It doesn't seem to show in the benchmarks. I wonder why?

This is a company which is shedding their coats of ethics and scientific rigor -- so as to be as unencumbered as possible in its footrace to the dollar.

Re: FrontierMath was funded by OpenAI

#95

Post by ripped_britches »

mlsu wrote: post #94
ripped_britches wrote: post #82

Do people actually think OpenAI is gaming benchmarks? I know they have lost trust and credibility, especially on HN. But this is a company with a giant revenue opportunity to sell products that work. What works for enterprise is very different from “does it beat this benchmark”. No matter how nefarious you think sama is, everything points to “build intelligence as rapidly as possible” rather than “spin our wheels mes…

Gaming benchmarks has a lot of utility for openAI whether their product works or not. Many people compare models based on benchmarks. So if openAI can appear better to Anthropic, Google, or Meta, by gaming benchmarks, it's absolutely in their interest to do so, especially if their product is only slightly behind, because evaluating model quality is very very tricky business these days. In particular, if there is a ne…

I think “getting beat handily” is a HN bubble concept. Depends on what you’re using it for, but I personally prefer 4o for coding. In enterprise usage, i think 4o is smoking 3.5 sonnet, but that’s just my perception from folks I talk to.

Re: FrontierMath was funded by OpenAI

#96

Post by refulgentis »

EvgeniyZh wrote: post #93
refulgentis wrote: post #19

Its increasingly odd to see HN activity that assumes the premise: if the latest benchmark results involved a benchmark that can be shown to have any data that OpenAI could have accessed, then, the benchmark results were intentionally faked. Last time this confused a bunch of people who didn't understand what test vs. train data meant and it resulted in a particular luminary complaining on Twitter, to much guffaws, ho…

Why wouldn't OpenAI cheat? It's an open secret in industry that benchmarks are trained on. Everybody does it, so you need to do that or else your similarly performing model will look worse on paper. And even they respect the agreement, even using test set as a validation set can be a huge advantage. That's why validation set and test set are two different terms with precise meaning. As for "knowing it's bad", most pe…

> Why wouldn't OpenAI cheat? It's an open secret in industry that benchmarks are trained on. Everybody does it, so you need to do that or else your similarly performing model will look worse on paper.

This starts with a fallacious appeal to cynicism combined with an unsubstantiated claim about widespread misconduct. The "everybody does it" argument is a classic rationalization that doesn't actually justify anything. It also misunderstands the reputational and technical stakes - major labs face intense scrutiny of their methods and results, and there's plenty of incestuous movement between labs and plenty of leaks.

> And even they respect the agreement, even using test set as a validation set can be a huge advantage. That's why validation set and test set are two different terms with precise meaning.

This part accidentally stumbles into a valid point about ML methodology while completely missing why it matters. Yes, validation and test sets serve different purposes - that's precisely why reputable labs maintain strict separations between them. The implication that this basic principle somehow proves misconduct is backwards logic.

> People who are using these models to solve math problems are tiny share of users and even tinier share of revenues.

This reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of why math capabilities matter. They're not primarily about serving math users - they're a key metric for abstract reasoning and systematic problem-solving abilities. This is basic ML evaluation theory.

> What OpenAI needs is to convince investors that there is still progress in capabilities going at high pace, and gaming the benchmarks makes perfect sense in this context. 25% was surprising and appeared to surpass expectations, which is exactly what OpenAI needs.

This concludes with pure speculation presented as fact, combined with a conspiracy theory that lacks any actual evidence. It also displays a shallow understanding of how technical due diligence works in major AI investments - investors at this level typically have deep technical expertise, access to extensive testing and validation, and most damningly, given the reductive appeal to incentive structure:

They closed the big round weeks before.

The whole comment reads like someone who has picked up some ML terminology but lacks fundamental understanding of how research evaluation, technical accountability, and institutional incentives actually work in the field. The dismissive tone and casual accusations of misconduct don't help their credibility either.

Re: FrontierMath was funded by OpenAI

#97

Post by mrg3_2013 »

OpenAI continues to muddy the benchmarks, while Claude continues to improve their intelligence. Claude will win long term. It'd be wise to not rely on OpenAI at all. They are the first comers who will just burn cash and crash out I suspect.

Re: FrontierMath was funded by OpenAI

#98

Post by raincole »

mlsu wrote: post #94
ripped_britches wrote: post #82

Do people actually think OpenAI is gaming benchmarks? I know they have lost trust and credibility, especially on HN. But this is a company with a giant revenue opportunity to sell products that work. What works for enterprise is very different from “does it beat this benchmark”. No matter how nefarious you think sama is, everything points to “build intelligence as rapidly as possible” rather than “spin our wheels mes…

Gaming benchmarks has a lot of utility for openAI whether their product works or not. Many people compare models based on benchmarks. So if openAI can appear better to Anthropic, Google, or Meta, by gaming benchmarks, it's absolutely in their interest to do so, especially if their product is only slightly behind, because evaluating model quality is very very tricky business these days. In particular, if there is a ne…

> On a personal level, their model is getting beat handily by Claude Sonnet 3.5 right now. It doesn't seem to show in the benchmarks. I wonder why?

I do use Sonnet 3.5 personally, but this "beat handily" doesn't show on LLM arena. Do OpenAI game that too?

Re: FrontierMath was funded by OpenAI

#99

Post by teleforce »

agnosticmantis wrote: post #13

“… we have a verbal agreement that these materials will not be used in model training” Ha ha ha. Even written agreements are routinely violated as long as the potential upside > downside, and all you have is verbal agreement? And you didn’t disclose this? At the time o3 was released I wrote “this is so impressive that it brings out the pessimist in me”[0], thinking perhaps they were routing API calls to human workers…

>perhaps they were routing API calls to human workers

Honest question, did they?

Re: FrontierMath was funded by OpenAI

#100

Post by hatefulmoron »

ripped_britches wrote: post #95
mlsu wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gaming benchmarks has a lot of utility for openAI whether their product works or not. Many people compare models based on benchmarks. So if openAI can appear better to Anthropic, Google, or Meta, by gaming benchmarks, it's absolutely in their interest to do so, especially if their product is only slightly behind, because evaluating model quality is very very tricky business these days. In particular, if there is a ne…

I think “getting beat handily” is a HN bubble concept. Depends on what you’re using it for, but I personally prefer 4o for coding. In enterprise usage, i think 4o is smoking 3.5 sonnet, but that’s just my perception from folks I talk to.

I don't think that's true, you'll get the same sentiment ("Sonnet 3.5 is much better than GPT4/GPT4o [for coding]") pretty uniformly across Reddit/HN/Lobsters. I would strongly agree with it in my own testing, although o1 might be much better (I'm too poor to give it a fair shake.)

> In enterprise usage, i think 4o is smoking 3.5 sonnet

True. I'm not sure how many enterprise solutions have given their users an opportunity to test Claude vs. GPT. Most people just use whatever LLM API their software integrates.

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