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Human preference does not always favor the model that is best at reasoning/code/accuracy whatever. In particular there's a recent article suggesting that Llama 3's friendly and direct chattiness contributes to it having a good standing in the leaderboard.

https://lmsys.org/blog/2024-05-08-llama3/

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Sure, that’s why I called it out as human preference data. But I still think the leaderboard is one of the best ways to compare models that we currently have.

If you know of better benchmark-based leaderboards where the data hasn’t polluted the training datasets, I’d love to see them, but just giving up on everything isn’t a good option.

The leaderboard is a good starting point to find models worth testing, which can then be painstakingly tested for a particular use case.

Oh I didn't mean that. I think it's the best benchmark, just it's not necessarily representative of ordering in any domain apart from generic human preference. So while Llama3 is high up there, we should not conclude for example that it is better at reasoning than all models below it (especially true for the 8B model).

I find that kind of surprising; the lack of “customer service voice” is one of the main reasons I prefer the Mistral models over Open AI’s, even if the latter are somewhat better at complex/specific tasks.

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