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Nguyen: AI bottleneck is evaluations rather than data as benchmarks saturate

Karina Nguyen · OpenAI researcher on why soft skills are the future of work | Karina Nguyen · Feb 9, 2025 · at 10:49

Karina Nguyen, an OpenAI researcher, explains why frontier model evaluation benchmarks are a bigger bottleneck for AI development than acquiring training data.

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“We are actually getting saturated in all benchmarks. So I think the bottleneck is actually in evaluations that we don't have all the frontier, like evals, like, I don't know GPGA, which is, like, A Google-proof question answering, like, PhD-level intelligence and better work is, like, getting to, like, I don't know, more than, like, 60, 70%, which is what PhD gets. So it's, like, they're literally hitting the wall in, like, evals.”

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