Benchmarks are useful to know where MLMs (multimodal language models) are deficient. Without an automated way to test improvements, improvements are rarely made

Benchmarks are useful to know where MLMs (multimodal language models) are deficient. Without an automated way to test improvements, improvements are rarely made. I don't think it's really about innovation being dead as much as like you said, benchmarks are king. So I would say if you want things to improve in that area, create a benchmark and it will eventually get solved.