Shawn Wang: belief

Transcript context

…So I'm on a sub team called Product Research. And basically the idea of product research is to really understand what end customers care about and want in the models and then work to try to make that happen. So we're not focused on sort of these more abstract general benchmarks like math problems or MMLU, but we really care about finding the things that are really valuable and making sure the models are great at those. And so because I've been interested in coding agents, I knew that this would be a really valuable thing. And I knew there were a lot of startups and our customers trying to build coding agents with our models. And so I said, hey, this is going to be a really good benchmark to be able to measure that and do well on it. And I wasn't the first person at Anthropic to find SWE-Bench, and there are lots of people that already knew about it and had done some internal efforts on it. It fell to me to sort of both implement the benchmark, which is very tricky, and then also to sort of make sure we had an agent and basically like a reference agent, maybe I'd call it, that could do very well on it. Ultimately, we want to provide how we implemented that reference agent so that people can build their own agents on top of our system and get sort of the most out of it as possible. So with this blog post we released on SWE-Bench, we released the exact tools and the prompt that we gave the model to be able to do well. For people who don't know, who maybe haven't dived into SWE-Bench, I think the general perception is they're like tasks that a software engineer could do. I feel like that's an inaccurate description because it is basically, one, it's a subset of like 12 repos. It's everything they could find that every issue with like a matching commit that could be tested. So that's not every commit. And then SWE-Bench verified is further manually filtered by OpenAI. Is that an accurate description and anything you'd change about that? Yes. SWE-Bench is, it certainly is a subset of all tasks. It's first of all, it's only Python repos, so already fairly limited there. And it's just 12 of these popular open source repos. And yes, it's only ones where there were tests that passed at the beginning and also new tests that were introduced that test the new feature that's added. So it is, I think, a very limited subset of real engineering tasks. But I think it's also very valuable because even though it's a subset, it is true engineering tasks. And I think a lot of other benchmarks are really kind of these much more artificial setups of even if they're related to coding, they're more like coding interview style questions or puzzles that I think are very different from day-to-day what you end up doing. I don't know how frequently you all get to use recursion in your day-to-day job, but whenever I do, it's like a treat. And I think it's almost comical, and a lot of people joke about this in the industry, is how different interview questions are.…

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