Artificial Analysis: The Independent LLM Analysis House — with George Cameron and Micah Hill-Smith

don’t miss George’s AIE talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRpqPgKeXNk

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From launching a side project in a Sydney basement to becoming the independent gold standard for AI benchmarking—trusted by developers, enterprises, and every major lab to navigate the exploding landscape of models, providers, and capabilities—George Cameron and Micah Hill-Smith have spent two years building Artificial Analysis into the platform that answers the questions no one else will: Which model is actually best for your use case? What are the real speed-cost trade-offs? And how open is "open" really?

We discuss:

• The origin story: built as a side project in 2023 while Micah was building a legal AI assistant, launched publicly in January 2024, and went viral after Swyx's retweet

• Why they run evals themselves: labs prompt models differently, cherry-pick chain-of-thought examples (Google Gemini 1.0 Ultra used 32-shot prompts to beat GPT-4 on MMLU), and self-report inflated numbers

• The mystery shopper policy: they register accounts not on their own domain and run intelligence + performance benchmarks incognito to prevent labs from serving different models on private endpoints

• How they make money: enterprise benchmarking insights subscription (standardized reports on model deployment, serverless vs. managed vs. leasing chips) and private custom benchmarking for AI companies (no one pays to be on the public leaderboard)

• The Intelligence Index (V3): synthesizes 10 eval datasets (MMLU, GPQA, agentic benchmarks, long-context reasoning) into a single score, with 95% confidence intervals via repeated runs

• Omissions Index (hallucination rate): scores models from -100 to +100 (penalizing incorrect answers, rewarding \"I don't know\"), and Claude models lead with the lowest hallucination rates despite not always being the smartest

• GDP Val AA: their version of OpenAI's GDP-bench (44 white-collar tasks with spreadsheets, PDFs, PowerPoints), run through their Stirrup agent harness (up to 100 turns, code execution, web search, file system), graded by Gemini 3 Pro as an LLM judge (tested extensively, no self-preference bias)

• The Openness Inde