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Comment by sanderjd | Hacker News Reader

Yeah but what is the point of "naked model" evaluations? It seems to me that the only interesting question is capability per time and cost (and conditioned on other important things, like privacy). It doesn't matter to me which part of that equation is being implemented by model weights and which part by other supporting software.

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It is useful to compare like for like.

Currently if my hypothesis about frontier labs doing creative tricks between the model and the client is true (and the results seem to favour it so far) the benchmarks are giving us an artificially lowered results for open weights models.

I have yet to test opus/sonet via my proxy. If Qwen gets 10% better and Opus stays the same that suggests one if two things: - either opus doesn't need it - or it's already done behind the scenes.

In my view, the useful like for like comparison is to the entire system that people actually use. Nobody uses a "naked model", so what is the point of these benchmarks that use them in that way?

I think the benchmarks should be trying to use realistic harnesses for both proprietary and open weight models.

Harnesses can fairly easily be adapted to other models. Moving capabilities from one model to another is a more involved process requiring distillation, training, etc.

I don't quite understand your point. Why are you moving those capabilities from one model to another, or improving the built-in capabilities of a model, what is the goal? If having the capabilities in the model itself improves the overall capability, then using that better model with the same harness should achieve better results. Or if the capabilities are the same, but they've been moved from the harness into the model, then there should be some other detectable improvement, like to speed or cost.

I don't know about others, I can only speak for myself. But I do appreciate numbers for bare models, numbers for model + harness, numbers comparing different models in the same harness, and numbers comparing several models across several harnesses.

It's a lot of information to ingest, but it gives me some idea of which part of the system is doing which part of the work, how well different harnesses and models interoperate, and more insight into the part of the equation under my direct control as a software developer.

I agree that all else equal, the more comparisons the merrier. But IMO, there has been way too much focus on benchmarks for the bare models, when it seems to me that what actually matters is what you can do with the technology, and that is never limited to what a bare model can do.

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