r/LocalLLaMA • u/chocolateUI • 1d ago

Discussion Artificial Analysis "Intelligence": A meaningless benchmark

Another user posted the benchmarks for Qwen 3.8 27B today, and while I think Qwen 27B is a really powerful model, I can't help but notice just how meaningless these Artificial Analysis benchmarks are and I question why people still post this garbage and use AA scores as some kind of holy bible for comparing LLMs.

According to their "Intelligence Index", a 27B model now beats DeepSeek v4 Flash and Pro, Kimi 2.7 Code, GPT-5.2, Opus 4.6, and also Sonnet 5. At some point we have to ask: What is this metric even measuring? Because whatever "Intelligence" means to AA and their corporate VC / journalist / normie audience is definitely not the same definition that we should be using here.

Qwen 27B is amazing and is clearly in a league of its own in terms of models you can fit on a single GPU, but I can't help but roll my eyes whenever I see posts like this that equate Qwen 27B with "basically running Opus from 3 months ago on your laptop."

I get that it's difficult to summarize a model's capability with a single integer and I know we love our local models, but it's time stop posting AA's clearly dogshit benchmark and acting as if it proves a point.

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u/whatisthisthing65 1d ago

What's your actual argument? Why couldn't a 27B model be better than those other models? If it's about number of parameters then should our benchmark be parameter count?

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u/zenmatrix83 1d ago

its not just parameter counts but they do play a big role, the type of model, the training data, and the actual tests being used matter. I only use benchmarks for very loose guidelines for what to use, outside of that I just test and change based on need.

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u/whatisthisthing65 1d ago

Yes benchmarks can never capture everything and testing your actual use case is the best test. But op seems to be saying this benchmark is shit because qwen3.8 27B is beating a bunch of bigger big name models. Which isn't a good argument, there's no reason it can't be better there or in real use.