METR Blog – METR: Details about METR’s preliminary evaluation of GPT-4o

Source URL: https://metr.github.io/autonomy-evals-guide/gpt-4o-report/
Source: METR Blog – METR
Title: Details about METR’s preliminary evaluation of GPT-4o

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**Summary:** The text covers METR’s preliminary evaluation of the GPT-4o model, detailing its performance on 77 tasks related to autonomous capabilities. It discusses the capabilities of the model in comparison to human performance and other models, particularly in software engineering and cybersecurity tasks. Critical observations include the classification of failure modes and potential areas for improvement, which are valuable for professionals involved in AI development and evaluation.

**Detailed Description:**

– **Evaluation Overview:**
– The text describes METR’s evaluation methodology for the GPT-4o model, which assesses its performance on tasks that require autonomous capabilities.
– This evaluation aims to address concerns about the dangerous capabilities of autonomous models, particularly in conducting cybersecurity tasks.

– **Performance Measurement and Comparison:**
– Performance was measured across 77 tasks spanning 30 task families.
– GPT-4o’s capabilities were found to be superior to Claude 3 Sonnet and GPT-4-Turbo, yet slightly less than Claude 3.5 Sonnet.
– GPT-4o exhibited robust skills such as systematic exploration and hypothesis testing, although it also faced various failure modes.

– **Failure Analysis:**
– A detailed examination of 150 failures of GPT-4o led to classification into types of mistakes, such as “real,” “spurious,” and “tradeoff” mistakes.
– About 51% of failures were characterized as spurious, suggesting potential for improvement through adjustments in handling task difficulty, thus indicating practical avenues for developers in enhancing AI robustness.

– **Performance Improvement Trials:**
– An experiment was carried out where a “patch” was applied to address one of the failure modes. Results showed a 40% success rate in previously failing tasks, pointing towards the potential for targeted improvements based on failure analysis.

– **Comparative Results and Insights:**
– The effectiveness of GPT-4o on simultaneous tasks was highlighted, emphasizing cost efficiency compared to human performance, although the agent’s ability to maximize performance with extended resources was noted as weaker.

– **Future Work Considerations:**
– The report indicates limitations in task selection and suggests that future evaluations could benefit from a wider array of realistic tasks, as well as a more nuanced understanding of AI capability metrics.

In essence, this evaluation points towards a growing understanding of how to measure and improve the performance of AI models in potentially sensitive domains like security, making it highly relevant for industry professionals focused on AI security and risk management.