⚙️ "You are technically correct, the best kind of correct..." Today I ran across an article from tech blogger Dan Luu about "The Benchmark-pocalypse." Luu had experimented with an LLM-generated regex engine and tested it against Rebar, a comprehensive benchmark suite. The engine out-performed the top scorer by 40%! Only, it didn't actually do that. When he applied the same regex engine to a different benchmark suite, he found that it was on average 4x slower , and that was on the benchmarks it was actually able to complete. The LLM had gamed the numbers because it knew what benchmarking suite it was going to be compared to. In fact, Luu had gone so far as to instruct the LLM not to overfit its data to that suite... but it did it anyway. LLMs are statistical inference engines with an optimization loop. Whether you intend to or not, they will tailor their output to maximize their optimization, which means they will game the system if only because gaming metric...
Be the strange you want to see in the world