Beyond Goodhart's Law: Why Evals Are the North Star for AI Capabilities
typewriters · x · 2026-08-14
Countering the common invocation of Goodhart's Law—which argues that evaluations lose their value once they become targets—the author argues that if the goal is to automate economically valuable jobs, we must evaluate those exact jobs.
The thread emphasizes that evals have consistently served as a North Star for capability progress. Examples include ARC-AGI forcing labs to innovate on test-time reasoning, and OSWorld driving improvements in computer use.
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