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[D] What is even the point of these LLM benchmarking papers?

Reddit r/MachineLearning / 3/13/2026

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Key Points

  • LLM benchmarking papers have proliferated at major conferences, but their usefulness is questioned because they benchmark proprietary models that change rapidly.
  • Proprietary LLMs are updated almost every month, and older versions can be deprecated or disappear, making results outdated by the time of publication.
  • The post asks whether big tech companies actually use these benchmark results to improve their models, highlighting a potential gap between benchmarks and real-world impact.
  • Suggestions include building dynamic, continuous evaluation benchmarks, open and reproducible suites, and time-aware leaderboards that track model performance over successive releases.

Lately, NeurIPS and ICLR are flooded with these LLM benchmarking papers. All they do is take a problem X and benchmark a bunch of propriety LLMs on this problem. My main question is these proprietary LLMs are updated almost every month. The previous models are deprecated and are sometimes no longer available. By the time these papers are published, the models they benchmark on are already dead.

So, what is the point of such papers? Are these big tech companies actually using the results from these papers to improve their models?

submitted by /u/casualcreak
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