When an organization releases a brand new AI video generator, it’s not lengthy earlier than somebody makes use of it to make a video of actor Will Smith consuming spaghetti.
It’s turn into one thing of a meme in addition to a benchmark: Seeing whether or not a brand new video generator can realistically render Smith slurping down a bowl of noodles. Smith himself parodied the development in an Instagram submit in February.
Google Veo 2 has finished it.
We at the moment are consuming spaghett finally. pic.twitter.com/AZO81w8JC0
— Jerrod Lew (@jerrod_lew) December 17, 2024
Will Smith and pasta is however one among a number of weird “unofficial” benchmarks to take the AI group by storm in 2024. A 16-year-old developer constructed an app that provides AI management over Minecraft and assessments its capacity to design constructions. Elsewhere, a British programmer created a platform the place AI performs video games like Pictionary and Join 4 towards one another.
It’s not like there aren’t extra educational assessments of an AI’s efficiency. So why did the weirder ones blow up?
For one, most of the industry-standard AI benchmarks don’t inform the common particular person very a lot. Firms usually cite their AI’s capacity to reply questions on Math Olympiad exams, or work out believable options to Ph.D.-level issues. But most individuals — yours actually included — use chatbots for issues like responding to emails and fundamental analysis.
Crowdsourced {industry} measures aren’t essentially higher or extra informative.
Take, for instance, Chatbot Enviornment, a public benchmark many AI lovers and builders observe obsessively. Chatbot Enviornment lets anybody on the internet charge how properly AI performs on explicit duties, like creating an internet app or producing a picture. However raters have a tendency to not be consultant — most come from AI and tech {industry} circles — and solid their votes based mostly on private, hard-to-pin-down preferences.
Ethan Mollick, a professor of administration at Wharton, lately identified in a submit on X one other downside with many AI {industry} benchmarks: they don’t examine a system’s efficiency to that of the common particular person.
“The fact that there are not 30 different benchmarks from different organizations in medicine, in law, in advice quality, and so on is a real shame, as people are using systems for these things, regardless,” Mollick wrote.
Bizarre AI benchmarks like Join 4, Minecraft, and Will Smith consuming spaghetti are most definitely not empirical — and even all that generalizable. Simply because an AI nails the Will Smith take a look at doesn’t imply it’ll generate, say, a burger properly.
One skilled I spoke to about AI benchmarks prompt that the AI group concentrate on the downstream impacts of AI as a substitute of its capacity in slim domains. That’s wise. However I’ve a sense that bizarre benchmarks aren’t going away anytime quickly. Not solely are they entertaining — who doesn’t like watching AI construct Minecraft castles? — however they’re straightforward to know. And as my colleague Max Zeff wrote about lately, the {industry} continues to grapple with distilling a know-how as complicated as AI into digestible advertising.
The one query in my thoughts is, which odd new benchmarks will go viral in 2025?
