alt Hacker NewsI like Erdos problems as a benchmark. Models continue to solve them, but a pretty tepid rate now that the low hanging fruit has been taken.
From https://epoch.ai/latest/announcing-frontiermath-erdos
> Only GPT-6 Astra solved anything: 2 of the 68 problems. It disproved problem 74 by finding a counterexample, at a cost of $218 and 15 hours of working time, and it proved problem 126, at a cost of $247 and 16 hours
> Across all attempts, GPT-6 Astra solved 5 of the 68 problems at least once: the two above, plus problem 1, which it disproved, and problem 548 and problem 571, which it proved. Most of the remaining problems were attempted between two and five times in total (172 attempts), and none was solved. Reaching these five solutions took over $220,000 of compute across all attempts, compared with roughly $20,000 for the benchmark run itself.
Which implies a genuine improvement in capability, but there's a still a very long tail ahead that models will continue to need to improve to capture.
Replies
A very long tail of problems that weren't solved by humans? Sure.
It's a sarcastic take and I understand that you are probably talking about "spiky intelligence", but you've chosen unsolved problems as a measure of the progress yourself.
I don't:
"Problems solved before a model's training cutoff can be filtered out, and all models compared on the remaining problems" means that the problems an older model actually solved are the ones that get filtered out, while the remaining problems are the ones it already tried and failed on. So older models end up with 0s on the filtered set and you can't really use this to compare new models to older ones.
Also, since these are known public problems, you can't stop people from spending far more than your arbitrary time and $ limits on them. So the number of clean problems will go down over time.