The Arc Prize Basis, a nonprofit co-founded by distinguished AI researcher François Chollet, introduced in a blog post on Monday that it has created a brand new, difficult take a look at to measure the overall intelligence of main AI fashions.
To date, the brand new take a look at, referred to as ARC-AGI-2, has stumped most fashions.
“Reasoning” AI fashions like OpenAI’s o1-pro and DeepSeek’s R1 rating between 1% and 1.3% on ARC-AGI-2, in response to the Arc Prize leaderboard. Highly effective non-reasoning fashions together with GPT-4.5, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, and Gemini 2.0 Flash rating round 1%.
The ARC-AGI exams include puzzle-like issues the place an AI has to determine visible patterns from a set of different-colored squares, and generate the right “reply” grid. The issues had been designed to drive an AI to adapt to new issues it hasn’t seen earlier than.
The Arc Prize Basis had over 400 individuals take ARC-AGI-2 to determine a human baseline. On common, “panels” of those individuals acquired 60% of the take a look at’s questions proper — a lot better than any of the fashions’ scores.
In a post on X, Chollet claimed ARC-AGI-2 is a greater measure of an AI mannequin’s precise intelligence than the primary iteration of the take a look at, ARC-AGI-1. The Arc Prize Basis’s exams are aimed toward evaluating whether or not an AI system can effectively purchase new expertise outdoors the info it was educated on.
Chollet stated that not like ARC-AGI-1, the brand new take a look at prevents AI fashions from counting on “brute drive” — in depth computing energy — to search out options. Chollet beforehand acknowledged this was a major flaw of ARC-AGI-1.
To handle the primary take a look at’s flaws, ARC-AGI-2 introduces a brand new metric: effectivity. It additionally requires fashions to interpret patterns on the fly as an alternative of counting on memorization.
“Intelligence shouldn’t be solely outlined by the power to unravel issues or obtain excessive scores,” Arc Prize Basis co-founder Greg Kamradt wrote in a blog post. “The effectivity with which these capabilities are acquired and deployed is a vital, defining element. The core query being requested is not only, ‘Can AI purchase [the] ability to unravel a job?’ but additionally, ‘At what effectivity or price?’”
ARC-AGI-1 was unbeaten for roughly 5 years till December 2024, when OpenAI launched its advanced reasoning model, o3, which outperformed all different AI fashions and matched human efficiency on the analysis. Nonetheless, as we famous on the time, o3’s performance gains on ARC-AGI-1 came with a hefty price tag.
The model of OpenAI’s o3 mannequin — o3 (low) — that was first to succeed in new heights on ARC-AGI-1, scoring 75.7% on the take a look at, acquired a measly 4% on ARC-AGI-2 utilizing $200 value of computing energy per job.
The arrival of ARC-AGI-2 comes as many within the tech trade are calling for brand new, unsaturated benchmarks to measure AI progress. Hugging Face’s co-founder, Thomas Wolf, not too long ago advised TechCrunch that the AI industry lacks sufficient tests to measure the key traits of so-called artificial general intelligence, together with creativity.
Alongside the brand new benchmark, the Arc Prize Basis introduced a new Arc Prize 2025 contest, difficult builders to succeed in 85% accuracy on the ARC-AGI-2 take a look at whereas solely spending $0.42 per job.