Yoav Goldberg: it's hard to tell real agent ability from benchmark overfitting

yoavgo · x · 2026-09-05

Yoav Goldberg pushes back on evaluating capabilities like "dynamic multi-step tasks in new environments," noting it's hard to distinguish genuine ability from fine-tuning on a wide-but-specific task set. Galyo's framing: reliably-scorable tasks with enough brute-force training get solved, popular benchmarks will all be beaten, abilities may not transfer — genuine progress is better measured by discoveries like solving open problems.

Related event: Researchers argue benchmarks fall to brute force; real progress should be measured by "discoveries"(6 posts)→

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