Phase 6 · Modern LLM engineering · Systems & safety
Benchmarks and their limits
What leaderboards measure, and what they miss.
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Why it matters
Every model launch comes with a table of benchmark scores, and model choices, budgets and headlines follow from them. Benchmarks are useful, but a two-point lead on a leaderboard can be noise, a model can score well on questions it saw in training, and the tasks rarely look like yours. This lesson is about reading those tables like an analyst.
What you'll be able to do
- Describe what major benchmarks measure, from multiple-choice exams to real software tasks
- Work out how big a score difference has to be before it means anything
- Recognize contamination, saturation and benchmark gaming
- Read leaderboards critically and know when to build your own evaluation
Before this lesson
Next in this phase: Interpretability