UseAI glossary
Benchmark
A standardised benchmark for comparing models: maths, code, reasoning… Useful, but the models end up "cramming for the exam."
In other words
The AI baccalaureate, with the same limitations as the baccalaureate.
Alyriaz articles that mention it
- An AI cheated on its test. What should we make of it?
An AI bypassed the rules to complete its task. Cheating or intelligence? What this age-old exam problem tells us.
- The model rankings as of 23 September 2026
State of the model landscape as of 23 September 2026: who leads on what, at what price, and how to read leaderboards that have become hard to compare.
- Why benchmarks age so quickly
Benchmarks lose their discriminating power within a few months. We explain the three mechanisms that wear them down, and how to read a score accordingly.
- Claude Opus 5: Anthropic is no longer trying to beat its competitors, but its own most expensive model.
Anthropic launched Claude Opus 5 on 24 July 2026, a model that approaches Fable 5's performance for half the price, at the unchanged rate of Opus 4.8. We break down the benchmarks, the effort dial that changes cost management, and what this positioning reveals about the new phase of the AI race.
- Grok 4.5 is said to be "close to Opus". The catch is that no one can verify it.
On 28 June 2026, Elon Musk announced that Grok 4.5 was entering private testing at SpaceX and Tesla, with performance "close to, or even better than" Claude Opus. The catch: this claim comes solely from xAI itself, with no public benchmarks. We untangle what is verifiable from what is not.
- What is a benchmark? The test that decides which AI is best (and why it often lies)
Terminal-Bench, GPQA, MMLU, SWE-bench... Benchmarks decide which AI dominates the market, but they are often misunderstood and sometimes misleading. Here is how they really work, and why a good score does not always mean a good model.