AI's New Benchmark Rule: BYOB
IBM News, Thursday, April 17th, 2025
Did a new model cheat on a given benchmark? Which benchmark is best? And what does "best" even mean when each benchmark measures performance on a different task?
These questions make experts like IBM's Senior Research Scientist Marina Danilevsky approach model evaluation with caution. 'Performing well on a benchmark is just that-performing well on that benchmark,' she tells IBM Think. Transparency is key, she says. 'We need to acknowledge the many things that a given benchmark does not test, so that the next benchmarks address some of those holes.'
In contrast to the quest for a single, be-all and end-all benchmark, new solutions are shifting control to users. A team from open-source AI platform Hugging Face recently launched YourBench, an open-source tool that enables enterprises and developers to use their own data to create custom benchmarks to evaluate their model performance.