Benchmarking Costs AI News & Updates
Reasoning AI Models Drive Up Benchmarking Costs Eight-Fold
AI reasoning models like OpenAI's o1 are substantially more expensive to benchmark than their non-reasoning counterparts, costing up to $2,767 to evaluate across seven popular AI benchmarks compared to just $108 for non-reasoning models like GPT-4o. This cost increase is primarily due to reasoning models generating up to eight times more tokens during evaluation, making independent verification increasingly difficult for researchers with limited budgets.
Skynet Chance (+0.04%): The increasing cost barrier to independently verify AI capabilities creates an environment where only the models' creators can fully evaluate them, potentially allowing dangerous capabilities to emerge with less external scrutiny and oversight.
Skynet Date (-1 days): The rising costs of verification suggest an accelerating complexity in AI models that could shorten timelines to advanced capabilities, while simultaneously reducing the number of independent actors able to validate safety claims.
AGI Progress (+0.08%): The emergence of reasoning models that generate significantly more tokens and achieve better performance on complex tasks demonstrates substantial progress toward more sophisticated AI reasoning capabilities, a critical component for AGI.
AGI Date (-3 days): The development of models that can perform multi-step reasoning tasks effectively enough to warrant specialized benchmarking suggests faster-than-expected progress in a key AGI capability, potentially accelerating overall AGI timelines.