Cognition launches new SWE-2 model, Rivaling Fable 5.1 and GPT-Astra
cognition.com338 points by seelos 8 hours ago
338 points by seelos 8 hours ago
If you're looking for reason to be skeptical, look no further than the massive delta between the Terminal Bench 2.1 (92.8%) and the Terminal Bench 4 score (27.3%).
Terminal Bench 4 was released a couple weeks ago, so the difference you're seeing between the two scores can be interpreted as "how well does this model generalize to new problems"? More crudely: "how benchmaxxed is this model?"
This is a groundless criticism. TB2.1 is saturated. TB4 is not. Sol xhigh is 90% on TB2.1 but 37% on TB4. Is it also "benchmaxxed"?
Your assumption is that the benchmarks are essentially identical in difficulty, with the only difference being their age and thus whether they could have been trained on.
> Sol xhigh is 90% on TB2.1 but 37% on TB4. Is it also "benchmaxxed"?
A model that was released a couple months ago scores 50% higher than SWE-2, a model released today, on an out-of-sample benchmark. Can I say I’ve come out of this more impressed with Sol?
Like you said, TB2 is saturated. Nobody would bat an eyelash at 90%. And yet here comes SWE-2 coming off top rope with an emphatic 92.4%. this is the definition of bench maxxing.
> A model that was released a couple months ago scores 50% higher than SWE-2, a model released today, on an out-of-sample benchmark. Can I say I’ve come out of this more impressed with Sol?
Wait a second, are we taking into account the massive difference in terms of resources of these two companies?
Irrelevant when they say they're competitive with Fable and Astra. They don't get to then roll that back and then say "but we have less compute!"
You're either competitive or not.
Benchmaxxing is the default case, and always has been.
It's really, really difficult to avoid it even when you care to stop yourself; and it's not even just a problem in machine learning, it's the standard failure mode of all minds capable of learning, human, animal, artificial.
Even pure genetics has this problem. Viruses and cancers also demonstrate this behaviour, with the bench being evolution's only option: reproductive success.
Why would I adapt myself to unseen environments unnecessarily?
You can see possible existing environments even if you explicitly blind yourself to them, through reflections off of environments that you do not blind yourself to. Even with the benchmark excluded, the social zeitgeist that has considered the benchmark and included it or ideas from the benchmark either implicitly or explicitly in their code, documentation, et cetera is still part of your training data.
Because then you could sit under the palm tree and enjoy your free bananas and relax.
"Sol xhigh is 90% on TB2.1 but 37% on TB4. Is it also "benchmaxxed"
Yes! extremely sharp RL-fried model. byte perfect hash gates and soak and smoke tests abound.
Fixed benchmarks will be debunked eventually I'd think. Better to use synthetic problems.
Too easy to game the numbers, and too easy to baselessly accuse companies of gaming the numbers, not to mention how you even define that.
Wouldn't work. A dynamic but verifiable problem. Is just a perfect target for a RL environment. If you don't have the verifiable part the benchmark is useless, or really expensive with human review. (Or just open ended)
> Sol xhigh is 90% on TB2.1 but 37% on TB4. Is it also "benchmaxxed"?
Yes? Just like every single model from every single AI lab.
Is Sol benchmaxxed? Of course it is. Altman was caught in previous attempts trying to game benchmarks, does anyone believe that he's found his moral compass and decided to stop exploiting as much as he can get away with?
> Altman was caught in previous attempts trying to game benchmarks
Sounds like something you just made up, or maybe you read it on some other Reddit/HN post and started repeating it because it aligned with your biases.
> does anyone believe that he's found his moral compass and decided to stop exploiting as much as he can get away with?
I don't think "OpenAI" is equivalent to "Sam Altman." I think if OpenAI was intentionally "benchmaxxing" purely for marketing purposes that information would leak, because OpenAI is full of good-faith researchers (although it can be difficult to avoid overfitting even if you're actually trying to improve the model's general abilities)
And lastly I think anyone can actually try Sol themselves and see that's it a good model, or if that's too subjective, it is clearly better than the previous version. The benchmarks are reflecting actual progress and anyone can verify this themselves.
There's this whole discussion going on about agents being more independent now. They don't follow instructions so well, they continue until the problem is done (sometimes too long), they don't ask the user for feedback.
That is a kind of benchmaxing: they are made to complete benchmarks tasks and one-offs well, and no longer work well in tandem with the user.
Regardless what you call it, it's a divergence between what the power user wants and what the model developers want, I think.
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A lot of people seem to be the Antichrist these days. I’d have though we’d get a lull after the millennium but it’s all the rage.
Well, the antichrist should be in and around this AI thing for one particular reason:
The devil cannot create anything of his own because he is not God, by definition. We have already observationally defined generative AI as something that cannot create anything novel in the sense it cannot output anything it has never seen (cannot create new, always a re-assortment of what is).
In that way , AI is a perfect mimicry of how the devil operates (in totality, as the devil perverts and replicates anything good, often subtly and always deceptively), which is to thieve off God, steal.
So he would be around, if you catch my drift, right about now. And I wouldn’t be shocked if he’s on HN, and that he would chose technology as the vessel. And ultimately, when it’s all said and done, I would not be shocked that those who studied and developed AI, did so for the devil whether they were aware or not.
Anyway, let a poor Christian have his end-times hypothesis.
What’s the antichrists goal though?
Create hell on earth or turn us all into heretics or something else?
Anti Christ goal:
Achieve total global dominance and become the object of worship over God, while killing all those who stay faithful to Jesus Christ.
Those who stay faithful see Heaven, those who don’t, see the Lake of Fire. It’s the final separation of the wheat from the chaff.
As per Revelations. Thank your for allowing me to edify :)
It's actually pretty cool of these old stories how well that maps to a dangerous tyrant.
The roman empire perfectly matched that and most powerful men seem to go that path.
It would also be kinda easy to argue many moderns countries are going down that path.
So, we're rooting for the Anti Christ then? I might have to change my stance on generative "ai" then.