The proliferation of AI leaderboards incentivizes companies to optimize models for specific benchmarks. This creates a risk of "acing the SATs" where models excel on tests but don't necessarily make progress on solving real-world problems. This focus on gaming metrics could diverge from creating genuine user value.

AI models show impressive performance on evaluation benchmarks but underwhelm in real-world applications. This gap exists because researchers, focused on evals, create reinforcement learning (RL) environments that mirror test tasks. This leads to narrow intelligence that doesn't generalize, a form of human-driven reward hacking.

AI intelligence shouldn't be measured with a single metric like IQ. AIs exhibit "jagged intelligence," being superhuman in specific domains (e.g., mastering 200 languages) while simultaneously lacking basic capabilities like long-term planning, making them fundamentally unlike human minds.

Current AI models resemble a student who grinds 10,000 hours on a narrow task. They achieve superhuman performance on benchmarks but lack the broad, adaptable intelligence of someone with less specific training but better general reasoning. This explains the gap between eval scores and real-world utility.

Just as standardized tests fail to capture a student's full potential, AI benchmarks often don't reflect real-world performance. The true value comes from the 'last mile' ingenuity of productization and workflow integration, not just raw model scores, which can be misleading.

Don't trust academic benchmarks. Labs often "hill climb" or game them for marketing purposes, which doesn't translate to real-world capability. Furthermore, many of these benchmarks contain incorrect answers and messy data, making them an unreliable measure of true AI advancement.

The disconnect between AI's superhuman benchmark scores and its limited economic impact exists because many benchmarks test esoteric problems. The Arc AGI prize instead focuses on tasks that are easy for humans, testing an AI's ability to learn new concepts from few examples—a better proxy for general, applicable intelligence.

The most fundamental challenge in AI today is not scale or architecture, but the fact that models generalize dramatically worse than humans. Solving this sample efficiency and robustness problem is the true key to unlocking the next level of AI capabilities and real-world impact.

AI models excel at specific tasks (like evals) because they are trained exhaustively on narrow datasets, akin to a student practicing 10,000 hours for a coding competition. While they become experts in that domain, they fail to develop the broader judgment and generalization skills needed for real-world success.