Improvement of the benchmark at HongShan started in 2022, following ChatGPT’s breakout success, as an inner software for assessing which fashions are value investing in. Since then, led by associate Gong Yuan, the staff has steadily expanded the system, bringing in outdoors researchers and professionals to assist refine it. Because the undertaking grew extra refined, they determined to launch it to the general public.
Xbench approached the issue with two completely different methods. One is just like conventional benchmarking: an educational take a look at that gauges a mannequin’s aptitude on numerous topics. The opposite is extra like a technical interview spherical for a job, assessing how a lot real-world financial worth a mannequin may ship.
Xbench’s strategies for assessing uncooked intelligence at present embody two parts: Xbench-ScienceQA and Xbench-DeepResearch. ScienceQA isn’t a radical departure from current postgraduate-level STEM benchmarks like GPQA and SuperGPQA. It consists of questions spanning fields from biochemistry to orbital mechanics, drafted by graduate college students and double-checked by professors. Scoring rewards not solely the proper reply but additionally the reasoning chain that results in it.
DeepResearch, against this, focuses on a mannequin’s means to navigate the Chinese language-language internet. Ten subject-matter specialists created 100 questions in music, historical past, finance, and literature—questions that may’t simply be googled however require vital analysis to reply. Scoring favors breadth of sources, factual consistency, and a mannequin’s willingness to confess when there isn’t sufficient knowledge. A query within the publicized assortment is “What number of Chinese language cities within the three northwestern provinces border a international nation?” (It’s 12, and solely 33% of fashions examined acquired it proper, in case you are questioning.)
On the corporate’s web site, the researchers mentioned they wish to add extra dimensions to the take a look at—for instance, elements like how inventive a mannequin is in its drawback fixing, how collaborative it’s when working with different fashions, and the way dependable it’s.
The staff has dedicated to updating the take a look at questions as soon as 1 / 4 and to keep up a half-public, half-private knowledge set.
To evaluate fashions’ real-world readiness, the staff labored with specialists to develop duties modeled on precise workflows, initially in recruitment and advertising and marketing. For instance, one process asks a mannequin to supply 5 certified battery engineer candidates and justify every decide. One other asks it to match advertisers with applicable short-video creators from a pool of over 800 influencers.
The web site additionally teases upcoming classes, together with finance, authorized, accounting, and design. The query units for these classes haven’t but been open-sourced.
ChatGPT-o3 once more ranks first in each of the present skilled classes. For recruiting, Perplexity Search and Claude 3.5 Sonnet take second and third place, respectively. For advertising and marketing, Claude, Grok, and Gemini all carry out effectively.
“It’s actually tough for benchmarks to incorporate issues which might be so onerous to quantify,” says Zihan Zheng, the lead researcher on a brand new benchmark known as LiveCodeBench Professional and a pupil at NYU. “However Xbench represents a promising begin.”
