New Perspective Paper: Benchmark Leaderboard Race Is a Distraction for Science
ShenRaphael · x · 2026-08-19
The authors argue the benchmark leaderboard race is becoming a distraction: harder exams appear every few months, models saturate them, yet AI is not making weekly discoveries.
Answering hard questions ≠ doing science. Discovery means reasoning and decisions under uncertainty—hypotheses that must survive verification, experiments that fail, noisy data demanding calibrated restraint. The Perspective proposes scoring AI scientists on full discovery episodes (state → action → observation → updated state, like an RL loop): score the trajectory, not just the answer, and preserve failures.
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