AI Benchmark Scores: Why 82% is actually 57%
How to Haircut an AI Benchmark ScoreAn 82% on the leaderboard could be about 57% on real finance workflows. Here's what to take off, and why.Milan ShenSep 30, 202621ShareEvery finance professional knows what to do with an Adjusted EBITDA from management case: scrutinize and likely haircut it. The numbers aren’t made up, but someone else built them, on assumptions that you don’t necessarily agree with.AI benchmark scores deserve the same treatment.
- ▪How to Haircut an AI Benchmark ScoreAn 82% on the leaderboard could be about 57% on real finance workflows.
- ▪Here's what to take off, and why.Milan ShenSep 30, 202621ShareEvery finance professional knows what to do with an Adjusted EBITDA from management case: scrutinize and likely haircut it.
- ▪The numbers aren’t made up, but someone else built them, on assumptions that you don’t necessarily agree with.AI benchmark scores deserve the same treatment.
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| Original publisher | Substack |
| Canonical URL | https://lessuncertain.substack.com/p/how-to-read-and-haircut-ai-benchmark |
| Publication time | Fri, 02 Oct 2026 01:02:38 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-10-02T01:21:49.955Z |
| Last seen | 2026-10-02T01:22:02.073Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | OF51rjFWRGj7 · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
How to Haircut an AI Benchmark ScoreAn 82% on the leaderboard could be about 57% on real finance workflows. Here's what to take off, and why.Milan ShenSep 30, 202621ShareEvery finance professional knows what to do with an Adjusted EBITDA from management case: scrutinize and likely haircut it. The numbers aren’t made up, but someone else built them, on assumptions that you don’t necessarily agree with.AI benchmark scores deserve the same treatment. Headline scores come with add-backs of their own: clean inputs, a single averaged run, light grading and simplified running environments.We are living in a time when the “frontier” gets refreshed every month or even week.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Substack.
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