#Benchmarks

Benchmarks provide the quantitative foundation for engineering decisions. Articles here cover medical AI benchmark design, the journey from 42% to 85% accuracy through systematic iteration, and how honest benchmarks drive better engineering outcomes than optimistic demo metrics.

3 posts tagged with benchmarks. ← All posts

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Pratik Dhanave · ·6 min read

Contamination, Gaming, and Goodhart's Law

A benchmark score is trustworthy only if the model hasn't seen the answers and no one has optimized directly for the test. Both assumptions fail constantly. Training data contamination inflates scores by rewarding memorization; optimizing for a benchmark turns it from a measure into a target and destroys its meaning. This post is about the ways evaluation gets corrupted — and how to defend against them.

A benchmark score is trustworthy only if the model hasn't seen the answers and no one optimized directly for the test — and both assumptions fail constantly. Training-data contamination inflates scores by rewarding memorization; optimizing for a benchmark turns it from a measure into a target. Here's how evaluation gets corrupted, and how to defend it.

Pratik Dhanave · ·5 min read

Benchmarks and How They're Designed

The scores that dominate model announcements — MMLU, GSM8K, HumanEval, and the rest — are benchmarks: standardized public tests that let the whole field compare models on common ground. They've driven enormous progress, but a benchmark is only as good as its design, and a number without understanding of what it measures is easy to misread. Knowing how benchmarks are built, and what makes a good one, is how you read a leaderboard critically instead of credulously.

The scores in model announcements — MMLU, GSM8K, HumanEval — are benchmarks: standardized public tests for comparing models on common ground. They've driven huge progress, but a benchmark is only as good as its design, and a number without understanding is easy to misread. Here's how they're built and what makes a good one.

All posts on this site are written by Pratik Dhanave, an Agentic AI Architect with 7+ years building production distributed systems, multi-agent AI platforms, and cloud-native infrastructure. About the author → Each article includes working code, architecture diagrams, and references to the specific frameworks and standards discussed. Browse all posts or explore related topics using the tag cloud above.