Olivia Watkins of OpenAI's Frontier Evals team explains why OpenAI moved away from SWE-bench Verified to harder benchmarks like SWE-bench Pro.
Opinion
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…”
Assertion Supported
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…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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,…”
Disclosure
Watkins: OpenAI will probably not release proprietary AI research coding benchmarks
“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 realist…”
Assertion Supported
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…”