Kaggle team position paper: AI competitions are the gold standard for GenAI evaluation
MeganRisdal · x · 2026-11-09
Megan Risdal points to a May 2025 position paper (arXiv:2505.00612) by D. Sculley and 9 co-authors from the Kaggle team arguing that:
- Empirical evaluation in GenAI is at a crisis point; traditional ML benchmarking can't handle models with near-unbounded input/output spaces, no well-defined ground truth, and strong feedback loops.
- Leakage and contamination are the hardest problems in GenAI evaluation.
- AI competitions have developed effective anti-leakage practices originally designed to stop cheaters, making them an underutilized gold standard for empirical rigor that the field should harness.
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