Equation 4 · How to Actually Compare Frontier AI Models Without Building a Misleading Leaderboard
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the function of the weights. Read the equation part by part below; each part has a contextual explanation and a link to its mathematical background.
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a function of the weights , the harness , the sampling temperature T , the number of samples k and how they are aggregated, the prompt template , the date t a snapshot was queried, plus sampling noise . A citation that fixes and leaves the other five free has not specified a comparable quantity. OpenAI’s own simple-evals table makes the same point from a different angle: rows the lab ran itself under a disclosed zero-shot chain-of-thought protocol sit beside rows for competitors’ models labelled “unknown” prompt style, sourced from those vendors’ own announcements rather than reproduced on OpenAI’s harness [ 5 ] . Even holding the harness…
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a function of the weights , the harness , the sampling temperature T , the number of samples k and how they are aggregated, the prompt template , the date t a snapshot was queried, plus sampling noise . A citation that fixes and leaves the other five free has not specified a comparable quantity. OpenAI’s own simple-evals table makes the same point from a different angle: rows the lab ran itself under a disclosed zero-shot chain-of-thought protocol sit beside rows for competitors’ models labelled “unknown” prompt style, sourced from those vendors’ own announcements rather than reproduced on OpenAI’s harness [ 5 ] . Even holding the harness fixed, dated snapshots of the same public model name diverge: that table lists three different GPT-4o release dates scoring 46.0%, 49.9%, and 53.1% on GPQA under the identical simple-evals protocol — a seven-point range attributable to nothing but which week the model was queried [ 5 ] .
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