The arms race to construct smarter AI fashions has a measurement downside: the checks used to rank them have gotten out of date nearly as rapidly because the fashions enhance. On Monday, Synthetic Evaluation, an unbiased AI benchmarking group whose rankings are intently watched by builders and enterprise consumers, launched a significant overhaul to its Intelligence Index that basically adjustments how the business measures AI progress.
The brand new Intelligence Index v4.0 incorporates 10 evaluations spanning brokers, coding, scientific reasoning, and common information. However the adjustments go far deeper than shuffling check names. The group eliminated three staple benchmarks — MMLU-Professional, AIME 2025, and LiveCodeBench — which have lengthy been cited by AI corporations of their advertising and marketing supplies. Of their place, the brand new index introduces evaluations designed to measure whether or not AI methods can full the sort of work that individuals really receives a commission to do.
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"This index shift displays a broader transition: intelligence is being measured much less by recall and extra by economically helpful motion," noticed Aravind Sundar, a researcher who responded to the announcement on X (previously Twitter).
Why AI benchmarks are breaking: The issue with checks that prime fashions have already mastered
The benchmark overhaul addresses a rising disaster in AI analysis: the main fashions have turn out to be so succesful that conventional checks can not meaningfully differentiate between them. The brand new index intentionally makes the curve more durable to climb. Based on Synthetic Evaluation, prime fashions now rating 50 or beneath on the brand new v4.0 scale, in comparison with 73 on the earlier model — a recalibration designed to revive headroom for future enchancment.
This saturation downside has plagued the business for months. When each frontier mannequin scores within the ninetieth percentile on a given check, the check loses its usefulness as a decision-making instrument for enterprises attempting to decide on which AI system to deploy. The brand new methodology makes an attempt to resolve this by weighting 4 classes equally — Brokers, Coding, Scientific Reasoning, and Genera l— whereas introducing evaluations the place even probably the most superior methods nonetheless battle.
The outcomes underneath the brand new framework present OpenAI's GPT-5.2 with prolonged reasoning effort claiming the highest spot, adopted intently by Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.5 and Google's Gemini 3 Professional. OpenAI describes GPT-5.2 as "probably the most succesful mannequin sequence but for skilled information work," whereas Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.5 scores larger than GPT-5.2 on SWE-Bench Verified, a check set evaluating software program coding skills.
GDPval-AA: The brand new benchmark testing whether or not AI can do your job
Probably the most vital addition to the brand new index is GDPval-AA, an analysis based mostly on OpenAI's GDPval dataset that checks AI fashions on real-world economically helpful duties throughout 44 occupations and 9 main industries. In contrast to conventional benchmarks that ask fashions to resolve summary math issues or reply multiple-choice trivia, GDPval-AA measures whether or not AI can produce the deliverables that professionals really create: paperwork, slides, diagrams, spreadsheets, and multimedia content material.
Fashions obtain shell entry and internet searching capabilities by way of what Synthetic Evaluation calls "Stirrup," its reference agentic harness. Scores are derived from blind pairwise comparisons, with ELO scores frozen on the time of analysis to make sure index stability.
Below this framework, OpenAI's GPT-5.2 with prolonged reasoning leads with an ELO rating of 1442, whereas Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.5 non-thinking variant follows at 1403. Claude Sonnet 4.5 trails at 1259.
On the unique GDPval analysis, GPT-5.2 beat or tied prime business professionals on 70.9% of well-specified duties, based on OpenAI. The corporate claims GPT-5.2 "outperforms business professionals at well-specified information work duties spanning 44 occupations," with corporations together with Notion, Field, Shopify, Harvey, and Zoom observing "state-of-the-art long-horizon reasoning and tool-calling efficiency."
The emphasis on economically measurable output is a philosophical shift in how the business thinks about AI functionality. Moderately than asking whether or not a mannequin can cross a bar examination or remedy competitors math issues — achievements that generate headlines however don't essentially translate to office productiveness — the brand new benchmarks ask whether or not AI can really do jobs.
Graduate-level physics issues expose the bounds of at this time's most superior AI fashions
Whereas GDPval-AA measures sensible productiveness, one other new analysis known as CritPT reveals simply how far AI methods stay from true scientific reasoning. The benchmark checks language fashions on unpublished, research-level reasoning duties throughout trendy physics, together with condensed matter, quantum physics, and astrophysics.
CritPT was developed by greater than 50 energetic physics researchers from over 30 main establishments. Its 71 composite analysis challenges simulate full-scale analysis initiatives on the entry degree — similar to the warm-up workout routines a hands-on principal investigator may assign to junior graduate college students. Each downside is hand-curated to supply a guess-resistant, machine-verifiable reply.
The outcomes are sobering. Present state-of-the-art fashions stay removed from reliably fixing full research-scale challenges. GPT-5.2 with prolonged reasoning leads the CritPT leaderboard with a rating of simply 11.5%, adopted by Google's Gemini 3 Professional Preview and Anthropic's Claude 4.5 Opus Pondering variant. These scores recommend that regardless of outstanding progress on consumer-facing duties, AI methods nonetheless battle with the sort of deep reasoning required for scientific discovery.
AI hallucination charges: Why probably the most correct fashions aren't all the time probably the most reliable
Maybe probably the most revealing new analysis is AA-Omniscience, which measures factual recall and hallucination throughout 6,000 questions overlaying 42 economically related matters inside six domains: Enterprise, Well being, Legislation, Software program Engineering, Humanities & Social Sciences, and Science/Engineering/Arithmetic.
The analysis produces an Omniscience Index that rewards exact information whereas penalizing hallucinated responses — offering perception into whether or not a mannequin can distinguish what it is aware of from what it doesn't. The findings expose an uncomfortable reality: excessive accuracy doesn’t assure low hallucination. Fashions with the very best accuracy usually fail to steer on the Omniscience Index as a result of they have an inclination to guess quite than abstain when unsure.
Google's Gemini 3 Professional Preview leads the Omniscience Index with a rating of 13, adopted by Claude Opus 4.5 Pondering and Gemini 3 Flash Reasoning, each at 10. Nonetheless, the breakdown between accuracy and hallucination charges reveals a extra advanced image.
On uncooked accuracy, Google's two fashions lead with scores of 54% and 51% respectively, adopted by Claude 4.5 Opus Pondering at 43%. However Google's fashions additionally exhibit larger hallucination charges than peer fashions, scoring 88% and 85%. Anthropic's Claude 4.5 Sonnet Pondering and Claude Opus 4.5 Pondering present hallucination charges of 48% and 58% respectively, whereas GPT-5.1 with excessive reasoning effort achieves 51%—the second-lowest hallucination price examined.
Each Omniscience Accuracy and Hallucination Charge contribute 6.25% weighting every to the general Intelligence Index v4.
Contained in the AI arms race: How OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic stack up underneath new testing
The benchmark reshuffling arrives at an particularly turbulent second within the AI business. All three main frontier mannequin builders have launched main new fashions inside only a few weeks — and Gemini 3 nonetheless holds the highest spot on a lot of the leaderboards on LMArena, a extensively cited benchmarking instrument used to match LLMs.
Google's November launch of Gemini 3 prompted OpenAI to declare a "code pink" effort to enhance ChatGPT. OpenAI is relying on its GPT household of fashions to justify its $500 billion valuation and over $1.4 trillion in deliberate spending. "We introduced this code pink to essentially sign to the corporate that we need to marshal sources in a single explicit space," mentioned Fidji Simo, CEO of purposes at OpenAI. Altman advised CNBC he anticipated OpenAI to exit its code pink by January.
Anthropic responded with Claude Opus 4.5 on November 24, attaining an SWE-Bench Verified accuracy rating of 80.9% — reclaiming the coding crown from each GPT-5.1-Codex-Max and Gemini 3. The launch marked Anthropic's third main mannequin launch in two months. Microsoft and Nvidia have since introduced multi-billion-dollar investments in Anthropic, boosting its valuation to about $350 billion.
How Synthetic Evaluation checks AI fashions: A take a look at the unbiased benchmarking course of
Synthetic Evaluation emphasizes that each one evaluations are run independently utilizing a standardized methodology. The group states that its "methodology emphasizes equity and real-world applicability," estimating a 95% confidence interval for the Intelligence Index of lower than ±1% based mostly on experiments with greater than 10 repeats on sure fashions.
The group's printed methodology defines key phrases that enterprise consumers ought to perceive. Based on the methodology documentation, Synthetic Evaluation considers an "endpoint" to be a hosted occasion of a mannequin accessible through an API — that means a single mannequin could have a number of endpoints throughout totally different suppliers. A "supplier" is an organization that hosts and gives entry to a number of mannequin endpoints or methods. Critically, Synthetic Evaluation distinguishes between "open weights" fashions, whose weights have been launched publicly, and actually open-source fashions—noting that many open LLMs have been launched with licenses that don’t meet the total definition of open-source software program.
The methodology additionally clarifies how the group standardizes token measurement: it makes use of OpenAI tokens as measured with OpenAI's tiktoken package deal as an ordinary unit throughout all suppliers to allow honest comparisons.
What the brand new AI Intelligence Index means for enterprise expertise choices in 2026
For technical decision-makers evaluating AI methods, the Intelligence Index v4.0 gives a extra nuanced image of functionality than earlier benchmark compilations. The equal weighting throughout brokers, coding, scientific reasoning, and common information signifies that enterprises with particular use instances could need to look at category-specific scores quite than relying solely on the mixture index.
The introduction of hallucination measurement as a definite, weighted issue addresses probably the most persistent considerations in enterprise AI adoption. A mannequin that seems extremely correct however regularly hallucinates when unsure poses vital dangers in regulated industries like healthcare, finance, and legislation.
The Synthetic Evaluation Intelligence Index is described as "a text-only, English language analysis suite." The group benchmarks fashions for picture inputs, speech inputs, and multilingual efficiency individually.
The response to the announcement has been largely constructive. "It’s nice to see the index evolving to scale back saturation and focus extra on agentic efficiency," wrote one commenter in an X.com put up. "Together with real-world duties like GDPval-AA makes the scores way more related for sensible use."
Others struck a extra bold observe. "The brand new wave of fashions that’s nearly to come back will go away all of them behind," predicted one observer. "By the tip of the yr the singularity shall be simple."
However whether or not that prediction proves prophetic or untimely, one factor is already clear: the period of judging AI by how effectively it solutions check questions is ending. The brand new customary is easier and way more consequential — can it do the work?
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