When an organization releases a brand new AI video generator, it’s not lengthy earlier than somebody makes use of it to make a video of actor Will Smith consuming spaghetti.
It’s turn into one thing of a meme in addition to a benchmark: Seeing whether or not a brand new video generator can realistically render Smith slurping down a bowl of noodles. Smith himself parodied the pattern in an Instagram submit in February.
Google Veo 2 has finished it.
We at the moment are consuming spaghett finally. pic.twitter.com/AZO81w8JC0
— Jerrod Lew (@jerrod_lew) December 17, 2024
Will Smith and pasta is however certainly one of a number of weird “unofficial” benchmarks to take the AI neighborhood by storm in 2024. A 16-year-old developer constructed an app that provides AI management over Minecraft and checks its capability to design buildings. Elsewhere, a British programmer created a platform the place AI performs video games like Pictionary and Join 4 in opposition to one another.
It’s not like there aren’t extra tutorial checks of an AI’s efficiency. So why did the weirder ones blow up?
For one, lots of the industry-standard AI benchmarks don’t inform the common individual very a lot. Firms typically cite their AI’s capability to reply questions on Math Olympiad exams, or determine believable options to PhD-level issues. But most individuals — yours really included — use chatbots for issues like responding to emails and fundamental analysis.
Crowdsourced {industry} measures aren’t essentially higher or extra informative.
Take, for instance, Chatbot Area, a public benchmark many AI lovers and builders comply with obsessively. Chatbot Area lets anybody on the internet fee how effectively AI performs on explicit duties, like creating an online app or producing a picture. However raters have a tendency to not be consultant — most come from AI and tech {industry} circles — and forged their votes based mostly on private, hard-to-pin-down preferences.
Ethan Mollick, a professor of administration at Wharton, lately identified in a submit on X one other downside with many AI {industry} benchmarks: they don’t evaluate a system’s efficiency to that of the common individual.
“The fact that there are not 30 different benchmarks from different organizations in medicine, in law, in advice quality, and so on is a real shame, as people are using systems for these things, regardless,” Mollick wrote.
Bizarre AI benchmarks like Join 4, Minecraft, and Will Smith consuming spaghetti are most actually not empirical — and even all that generalizable. Simply because an AI nails the Will Smith take a look at doesn’t imply it’ll generate, say, a burger effectively.
One professional I spoke to about AI benchmarks prompt that the AI neighborhood deal with the downstream impacts of AI as an alternative of its capability in slim domains. That’s wise. However I’ve a sense that bizarre benchmarks aren’t going away anytime quickly. Not solely are they entertaining — who doesn’t like watching AI construct Minecraft castles? — however they’re simple to grasp. And as my colleague Max Zeff wrote about lately, the {industry} continues to grapple with distilling a know-how as advanced as AI into digestible advertising.
The one query in my thoughts is, which odd new benchmarks will go viral in 2025?
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