Mitchell: o3 output distribution makes single-prompt evaluations misleading
Eric Mitchell · No Priors Ep. 113 | With OpenAI's Eric Mitchell and Brandon McKinzie · May 1, 2025 · at 35:21
OpenAI research scientist Eric Mitchell discusses how frontier reasoning models should be evaluated and tested by users.
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“O-three can do really cool things, like when it chains together a lot of tool calls, and then, like, sometimes for the same prompt, it won't have that, you know, moment of magic, or it will, you know, just take a little, it'll do a little less work for you, and so, yeah, though, like, the peak performance is really impressive, but there is a distribution of behavior, and I think people often don't appreciate that there is this distribution of outcomes when you put the same prompt in, and getting intuition about that is useful.”
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