What Do Benchmarks Actually Measure?

Benchmarks are useful only when someone actively tries to break them

New blogpost: What does your benchmark actually measure? I argue what evals end up measuring is the simplest way to improve performance on them. When building a new benchmark, we are often too focused on minimizing scores at launch.
Ranked #3 on backlist 2026-06-22 (22 Jun 2026 UTC) · by (Shashwat Goel) ·

How it ranks: Backlist reads my Twitter/X timeline, scores every tweet for substance with an LLM rubric (not engagement), and publishes the daily top picks with a one-line takeaway. Curated by Surya Dantuluri.