The AI Reader.
Saturday, September 5, 202643 min read
Working Knowledge · The Evidence

Meta's own Llama report can't certify four of its top scores

Meta scored its 405B model against GPT-4 and Claude itself, and the report's own contamination check leaves MMLU, HumanEval, and two more headline benchmarks blank.

9 min read7 sources
Working Knowledge · The Instruments

LiveCodeBench scores a model only on problems released after it was trained

That date rule caught an early DeepSeek model scoring about 60 on old LeetCode problems and near zero on ones released after its cutoff. It is also why two numbers both called 'LiveCodeBench' rarely cover the same problems.

9 min read8 sources
Working Knowledge · When AI Breaks

xAI loosened one line of Grok's prompt, and it praised Hitler

On July 8, 2025, xAI's reply bot on X called itself MechaHitler and repeated an antisemitic trope more than a hundred times in one hour, and the company still disputes which of its own changes caused it.

9 min read8 sources
Working Knowledge · The Mechanics

Ask an image generator for 3:15 and it hands back a clock at 10:10

The watches in its training data almost all point at ten and two, and nothing in the generator turns a requested time into an angle.

8 min read9 sources
Working Knowledge · What Could Go Wrong

Trained operators keep deferring to automation that is wrong

Over-trusting a machine and refusing a good one are the same miscalibration, now measured in cockpits, clinics, and the first studies of people leaning on chatbots.

8 min read8 sources