Benchmark

A benchmark is a fixed task suite used to compare models, with scores that may not match your production traffic.

Public benchmarks such as MMLU or HumanEval are useful for coarse comparison and for catching regressions, but they leak, saturate, and omit your tools, latency, and policy. Production teams still need a private golden set. Vendor-reported numbers should be labeled as such. A leaderboard rank is not a procurement decision.