Watkins: OpenAI will probably not release proprietary AI research coding benchmarks
Olivia Watkins · The End of SWE-Bench Verified — Mia Glaese & Olivia Watkins, OpenAI Frontier Evals · Feb 23, 2026 · at 20:04
Olivia Watkins of OpenAI Frontier Evals discusses why publicly available coding benchmarks rarely evaluate frontier AI/ML code development.
0:00 / 0:15exact quote · 15.5s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Because a lot of the, like, you know, state-of-the-art AI code bases are proprietary. So if we make evals for that, like, we're probably not gonna release them. And it's harder for people in the field to make evals that kind of measure, like, is this a realistic research coding?”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Olivia Watkins
Watkins: SWE-bench Verified is saturated, contaminated, and should be retired
“SweetBenchVerified has been one of the Northstar coding benchmarks that the field has looked at to measure coding progress. But recently we've seen that progress has kind of stalled and this, we realized that this is because the eval is effectively saturated a…”
Watkins: Over half of SWE-bench problems investigated by OpenAI had test flaws
“In over half of the problems that were investigated in that deep dive, there was one problem or the other. I think the most common problem are, like, overly narrow tests where there's some particular implementation detail that the tests were looking for but wa…”
Watkins: SWE-bench Verified is contaminated across OpenAI, Claude, and Gemini models
“And in SweetBenchVerified, we found many instances of contamination across like, across OpenEye models, across, like, Quad Opus, 4.5, Gemini Flash, and all of these, we saw things like regurgitating the ground truth solutions, things like in some cases giving,…”
Watkins: About 90% of SWE-bench Verified tasks take under an hour
“For Sweep Edge Verified I think that's something like, 90% of the problems are things that were estimated to take, like, an expert software engineer like, less than an hour.”
Watkins: OpenAI hired nearly 100 engineers to curate 500 SWE-bench tasks
“So folks at OpenAI did a pretty extensive human data campaign, hiring like almost a hundred real-world software engineers to go through the problems and figure out, like, are the tasks well-specified? Are the tests actually fair and kind of created a curated s…”