edit to add: there totally is benchmaxxing going on, but I'd be really surprised if it wasn't across the board. After all, how can any lab tell if their model has improved over a previous iteration, if not by comparing benchmark performance?
American models are too rich for my blood though. I use GLM 5.3 Flash more than any other model and it has the same issues as Mimo. Deepseek 4.1 Flash is turning out to be a sweet spot for me; it's cheap and blazing fast on CoralBricks where I've been using it, so I don't mind when it overthinks (I try to pay attention to what my agents are doing, and it tends to finish tasks before I can skim half of its reasoning)
That especially the small flash models that are primarily optimized for coding tasks would perform worse at non-coding tasks is not per se surprising to me. The introduction of Terminal-Bench Science 0.1 in particular hurts their aggregate scores [2].
The general question remains of how meaningful aggregating the results of very heterogeneous tasks into a single numeric score is. (Aside from general questions about individual benchmark validity.)
Note: the cyber index is also interesting. While refusals make it somewhat opaque, even if you optimistically count all refusals for Opus and Fable as successes, the results are ... fascinating [3].
I'll add that I really want to know how Opus 4.x and Codex 5.x perform on the new index. Once we have that information, this is going to give us a better understanding of how meaningful the scores are.
[1] https://artificialanalysis.ai/#coding-agents-tabs
[2] https://artificialanalysis.ai/evaluations/terminal-bench-sci...
It is hard to tell what people are trying to say when they use undefined words with no particular meaning. This doesn't seem to change the relative position of the Chinese models much. The Chinese are a month or few behind and the state of intelligence is so volatile that the top 10 will be completely different in 6 months. I'd expect it to still be a mix of US and Chinese models with the US models leading.
One can argue though some models are post-trained heavily for specific benchmarks and less for other datasets. So they are weaker on out of distribution tasks.
- Exact problems on benchmark.
- Similar problems to benchmark.
- Broad class of problems or techniques that might apply to benchmark
Each has very different ramifications for how the model performs. The current evidence is that Anthropic and OpenAI is generally operating lower in the list.