They try to notice and work around spurious failures. Apparently 10 days was not long enough to resolve o1′s spurious failures.
METR could not confidently upper-bound the capabilities of the models during the period they had model access, given the qualitatively strong reasoning and planning capabilities, substantial performance increases from a small amount of iteration on the agent scaffold, and the high rate of potentially fixable failures even after iteration.
(Plus maybe they try to do good elicitation in other ways that require iteration.)
If this is a pattern with new, more capable models, this seems like a big problem. One major purpose of this kind of evaluation to set up thresholds that ring alarms bells when they are crossed. If it takes weeks of access to a model to figure out how to evaluate it correctly, the alarm bells may go off too late.
I expect there’s lots of new forms of capabilities elicitation for this kind of model, which their standard framework may not have captured, and which requires more time to iterate on
Should it really take any longer than 10 days to evaluate? Isn’t it just a matter of plugging it into their existing framework and pressing go?
They try to notice and work around spurious failures. Apparently 10 days was not long enough to resolve o1′s spurious failures.
(Plus maybe they try to do good elicitation in other ways that require iteration.)
If this is a pattern with new, more capable models, this seems like a big problem. One major purpose of this kind of evaluation to set up thresholds that ring alarms bells when they are crossed. If it takes weeks of access to a model to figure out how to evaluate it correctly, the alarm bells may go off too late.
I expect there’s lots of new forms of capabilities elicitation for this kind of model, which their standard framework may not have captured, and which requires more time to iterate on