Equation 3 · Ten Failure Modes That Show Up Across Every Frontier Model, Not Just One
What does this equation mean?
Read the formula alongside the article passage below. Each part has a deeper page with its role in the equation, the supporting passage and nearby citations.
variance from everything about how the question was asked, formatted, and scored — prompt wording, decoding settings, which variant answered. Read the equation part by part below; each part has a contextual explanation and a link to its mathematical background.
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Symbol Delta_configuration
variance from everything about how the question was asked, formatted, and scored — prompt wording, decoding settings, which variant answered.
subscript
The lower label selects a particular version, component, or indexed member of the quantity. For example, x₀ and xₜ can be values at different positions.
How to interpret it
Read this expression with the definitions, units, and assumptions supplied by the article.
What the article says around this equation
is inflation from the model having seen the benchmark, or something close to it, during training. is variance from everything about how the question was asked, formatted, and scored — prompt wording, decoding settings, which variant answered. Both terms are provider-specific and time-specific; neither is disclosed by the headline number. Three of the ten failure modes below are different ways that and get large without the label on the chart changing.
For background, read the article’s source list.
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