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Arc-AGI-2 and ARC Prize 2025
- gkamradt 1y agoHey HN, Greg from ARC Prize Foundation here. Alongside Mike Knoop and François Francois Chollet, we’re launching ARC-AGI-2, a frontier AI benchmark that measures a model’s ability to generalize on tasks it hasn’t seen before, and the ARC Prize 2025 competition to beat it. In Dec ‘24, ARC-AGI-1 (2019) pinpointed the moment AI moved beyond pure memorization as seen by OpenAI's o3. ARC-AGI-2 targets test-time reasoning. My view is that good AI benchmarks don't just measure progress, they inspire it. Our mission is to guide research towards general systems. Base LLMs (no reasoning) are currently scoring 0% on ARC-AGI-2. Specialized AI reasoning systems (like R1 or o3-mini) are <4%. Every (100%) of ARC-AGI-2 tasks, however, have been solved by at least two humans, quickly and easily. We know this because we tested 400 people live. Our belief is that once we can no longer come up with quantifiable problems that are "feasible for humans and hard for AI" then we effectively have AGI. ARC-AGI-2 proves that we do not have AGI. Change log from ARC-AGI-2 to ARC-AGI-2: * The two main evaluation sets (semi-private, private eval) have increased to 120 tasks * Solving tasks requires more reasoning vs pure intuition * Each task has been confirmed to have been solved by at least 2 people (many more) out of an average of 7 test taskers in 2 attempts or less * Non-training task sets are now difficulty-calibrated The 2025 Prize ($1M, open-source required) is designed to drive progress on this specific gap. Last year's competition (also launched on HN) had 1.5K teams participate and had 40+ research papers published. The Kaggle competition goes live later this week and you can sign up here: https://arcprize.org/competition https://arcprize.org/competition We're in an idea-constrained environment. The next AGI breakthrough might come from you, not a giant lab. Happy to answer questions.
- artninja1988 1y agoWhat are you doing to prevent the test set being leaked? Will you still be offering API access to the semi private test set to the big model providers who presumably train on their API?
- gkamradt 1y agoWe have a few sets: 1. Public Train - 1,000 tasks that are public 2. Public Eval - 120 tasks that are public So for those two we don't have protections. 3. Semi Private Eval - 120 tasks that are exposed to 3rd parties. We sign data agreements where we can, but we understand this is exposed and not 100% secure. It's a risk we are open to in order to keep testing velocity. In theory it is very difficulty to secure this 100%. The cost to create a new semi-private test set is lower than the effort needed to secure it 100%. 4. Private Eval - Only on Kaggle, not exposed to any 3rd parties at all. Very few people have access to this. Our trust vectors are with Kaggle and the internal team only.
- zamadatix 1y agoWhat prevents everything in 4 from becoming a part of 3 the first time the test set is run on a proprietary model, do you require competitors like OpenAI provide models Kaggle can self host for the test?
- gkamradt 1y ago#4 (private test set) doesn't get used for any public model testing. It is only used on the Kaggle leaderboard where no internet access is allowed.
- zamadatix 1y agoSorry, I probably phrased the question poorly. My question is more along the lines of "when you already scored e.g. OpenAI's o3 on ARC AGI 2 how did you guarantee OpenAI can't just look at its server logs to see question set 4"?
- gkamradt 1y agoAh yes, two things 1. We had a no-data retention agreement with them. We were assured by the highest level of their company + security division that the box our test was run on would be wiped after testing 2. We only tested o3 against the semi-private set. We didn't test it with the private eval.
- gmkhf 1y agoI think a lot of people got discouraged, seeing how openai solved arc agi 1 by what seems like brute forcing and throwing money at it. Do you believe arc was solved in the "spirit" of the challenge? Also all the open sourced solutions seem super specific to solving arc. Is this really leading us to human level AI at open ended tasks?
- jmtulloss 1y agoWhy is this the same comment as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43466406 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43466406?
- synapsomorphy 1y agoThanks for your awesome work Greg! The success of o3 directly contradicts us being in an "idea-constrained environment", what makes you believe that?
- littlestymaar 1y agoWhat makes you think so? From ChatGPT 3.5 to o1, all LLMs progress came from investment in training: either by using much more data, or using higher quality data thanks to artificial data. o1 (and then o3) broke this paradigm by applying a novel idea (RL+search on CoT) and that's because of it that it was able to make progress on ARC-AGI. So IMO the success of o3 goes in favor of the argument of how we are in an idea-constrained environment.
- torginus 1y agoThis isn't a novel idea - some people tried the exact same thing the day GPT4 came out. And going back even further, there's Goal Oriented Action Planning - an old timey video game AI technique, that's basically searching through solution space to construct a plan: https://medium.com/@vedantchaudhari/goal-oriented-action-planning-34035ed40d0b https://medium.com/@vedantchaudhari/goal-oriented-action-pla... (besides the fact that almost all old timey AI is state space solution search)
- littlestymaar 1y agoWhat's new is to apply that to LLMs, that is. > This isn't a novel idea - some people tried the exact same thing the day GPT4 came out. What do you mean? Since GPT4's weights aren't available, you can't run RL on it by yourself. Only OpenAI can.
- jononor 1y agoNot Greg/team, so unrelated opinion. o3 solution for ARC v1 was incredibly expensive. Some good ideas are at least needed to take that cost down by a factor 100-10000x.
- vessenes 1y agoJust want to say I really love these new problems - feels like some general intelligence went into conceiving of and creating these puzzles: we just did a few over dinner as a family. You have my wheels turning on how to get computers better at these. Looking forward to see G the first computer tech that can get 30-50% on these!
- az226 1y agoDid any single individual solve all problems? How many such individuals were there?
- levocardia 1y agoI'm really pleased to see this! The original ARC-AGI-1 paper still informs how I think about "what is intelligence" today. I was thrilled to see AI models make real progress on that test precisely when we had the next big idea (reasoning). Here's to hoping round 2 falls with a similarly big breakthrough!
- tananaev 1y agoDid I read this right that only 2 humans out of 400 solved the problems?
- trott 1y agoThey started with N >= 120x3 tasks, and gave each task to 4-9 humans. Then they kept only those 120x3 tasks that at least 2 humans had solved.
- tananaev 1y agoThat's a very small sample size by task. I wonder if they give the whole data set to an average human, what the result would be. I tried some simple tasks and they are doable, but I couldn't figure out the hard ones.
- mapmeld 1y agoNo, they're saying that the problems have been reviewed / play-tested by ≥2 humans, so they are not considered unfair or too ambiguous to solve in two attempts (a critique of some Arc-AGI-1 puzzles that o3 missed). They have a lot of puzzles so they were divided among some number of testers, but I don't think every tester had to try every problem.
- doctorpangloss 1y agoWhy doesn’t every blogpost contain an example of a question you ask?
- Chathamization 1y ago> Our belief is that once we can no longer come up with quantifiable problems that are "feasible for humans and hard for AI" then we effectively have AGI. I don’t think that follows. Just because people fail to create ARC-AGI problems that are difficult for an AI to solve, doesn’t mean that said AI can just be plugged into a humanoid robot and it will now reliably cook dinner, order a pizza and drive to pick it up, take a bus to downtown to busk on the street and take the money back home, etc. ARC-AGI is an interesting benchmark, but it’s extremely presumptive to think that these types of tests are going to demonstrate AGI.
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- Palmik 1y agoIn your example you already indicated two tasks that you think might be hard for AI but easy for humans. Who said that cooking dinner couldn't be part of ARC-AGI-<N>?
- Chathamization 1y agoThat’s precisely what I meant in my comment by “these types of tests.” People are eventually going to have some sort of standard for what they consider AGI. But that doesn’t mean the current benchmarks are useful for this task at all, and saying that the benchmarks could be completely different in the future only underscores this.
- pillefitz 1y agoThey are useful to reach Arc-N+1
- Chathamization 1y agoHow are any of these a useful path to asking an AI to cook dinner? We already know many tasks that most humans can do relatively easily, yet most people don’t expect AI to be able to do them for years to come (for instance, L5 self-driving). ARC-AGI appears to be going in the opposite direction - can these models pass tests that are difficult for the average person to pass. These benchmarks are interesting in that they show increasing capabilities of the models. But they seem to be far less useful at determining AGI than the simple benchmarks we’ve had all along (can these models do everyday tasks that a human can do?).
- Centigonal 1y agoThank you for including cost (or really any proxy for efficiency) as a dimension to this prize!
- az226 1y agoWhich puzzles had the lowest solve rate? I did the first 10 and felt all easy (mentally solve it in 10-20 seconds for easier ones and 30-60 seconds for harder ones), I’d like to try the most difficult ones.
- celdon25 1y agoWhy wasn’t the ICOM framework (D. Kelley) allowed to make a scoring submission after they claimed to have beaten the scores? Are you concerned that may appear to contradict your mission statement and alienate the AGI community?
- ustad 1y agoUsing AGI in the titles of your tests might not be accurate or appropriate. May I suggest NAI - Narrow AI?
- JFingleton 1y agoMy prediction: we'll be arguing about what AGI actually is... Forever.
- throwuxiytayq 1y agoOr depending on your outlook, for a couple of years, and then we will no longer be participating in these or any other cognitive exercises.
- artificialprint 1y agoOh boy! Some of these tasks are not hard, but require full attention and a lot of counting just to get things right! ARC3 will go 3D perhaps? JK Congrats on launch, lets see how long it'll take to get saturated
- fchollet 1y agoARC 3 is still spatially 2D, but it adds a time dimension, and it's interactive.
- artninja1988 1y agoI think a lot of people got discouraged, seeing how openai solved arc agi 1 by what seems like brute forcing and throwing money at it. Do you believe arc was solved in the "spirit" of the challenge? Also all the open sourced solutions seem super specific to solving arc. Is this really leading us to human level AI at open ended tasks?
- fchollet 1y agoIt's useful to know what current AI systems can achieve with unlimited test-time compute resources. Ultimately though, the "spirit of the challenge" is efficiency, which is why we're specifically looking for solutions that are at least within 1-2 order of magnitude of cost from being competitive with humans. The Kaggle leaderboard is very resource-constrained, and on the public leaderboard you need to use less than $10,000 in compute to solve 120 tasks.
- Legend2440 1y agoEfficiency sounds like a hardware problem as much as a software problem. $10000 in compute is a moving target, today's GPUs are much much better than 10 years ago.
- NitpickLawyer 1y ago> $10000 in compute is a moving target And it's also irrelevant in some fields. If you solve a "protein folding" problem that was a blocker for a pharma company, that 10k is peanuts now. Same for coding. If you can spend 100$ / hr on a "mid-level" SWE agent but you can literally spawn 100 today and 0 tomorrow and reach your clients faster, again the cost is irrelevant.
- FergusArgyll 1y agoI'd love to hear from the ARC guys: These benchmarks, and specifically the constraints placed on solving them (compute etc) seem to me to incentivize the opposite of "general intelligence" Have any of the technical contributions used to win the past competition been used to advance general AI in any way? We have transformer based systems constantly gaining capabilities. On the other hand have any of the Kaggle submissions actually advanced the field in any way outside of the ARC Challenge? To me (a complete outsider, admittedly) the ARC prize seems like an operationalization of the bitter lesson
- gkamradt 1y agoGood question! This was one of the main motivations of our "Paper Prize" track. We wanted to reward conceptual progress vs leaderboard chasing. In fact, when we increased the prizes mid year we awarded more money towards the paper track vs top score. We had 40 papers submitted last year and 8 were awarded prizes. [1] On of the main teams, MindsAI, just published their paper on their novel test time fine tuning approach. [2] Jan/Daniel (1st place winners last year) talk all about their progress and journey building out here [3]. Stories like theirs help push the field forward. [1] https://arcprize.org/blog/arc-prize-2024-winners-technical-report https://arcprize.org/blog/arc-prize-2024-winners-technical-r... [2] https://github.com/MohamedOsman1998/deep-learning-for-arc/blob/main/deep_learning_for_arc.pdf https://github.com/MohamedOsman1998/deep-learning-for-arc/bl... [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTX_sAq--zY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTX_sAq--zY
- jononor 1y agoNot the team, just follow ARC on-and-off as a ML engineer. I think it will take a few years (at least) to see the impact of ARC, especially the more conceptual works. Those are more close to basic research than applied - It will take time before the lessons are transferred to applications (that also requires considerable R&D). But more importantly, current LLM-based systems and the in-the-spirit-of-ARC-systems have quite different goals. The ARC challenge is intended to measure and build system which can learn efficiently - that is, be able to solve a novel task with very little new data. Ref F. Chollet paper "On the Measure of Intelligence". Current LLMs do not care for learning efficiency at all - actually the strategy is completely opposite - they aim to utilize ss much data and compute as possible to make the most capable system (at least on task that are somehow spanned by the training data). Which works well, but is for sure quite costly and it might also limit applications to those that not require a lot of learning at runtime (we still do not know how far we can take in-context learning). ARC brings in a fresh perspective, but I expect it to take several years for the approaches to really start cross-pollinating.
- Nesco 1y agoAt the very first glance, it's like ARC 1 with some structures serving as contextual data, and more complicated symmetries / topological transformations. Now, I wonder what surprises are to be found in the full dataset. The focus on solving cost efficiently discrete tasks might actually lead us towards deep learning systems that could be used reliably in production, and not just give a whoa effect or need to be constantly supervised
- lawrenceyan 1y agoConcrete benchmarks like these are very valuable. Defining the reward function, which is basically what ARC is doing, is 50% of the problem solving process.
- ipunchghosts 1y agoThe computer vision community needs an dataset like this for evaluation... train in one domain and test on another. The best we have now are thr imagenet r and c datasets. Humans have no issues with domain adaptation with vision, but comouter vision models struggle in many ways sti including out of domain images.
- momojo 1y agoHave you had any neurologists utilize your dataset? My own reaction after solving a few of the puzzles was "Why is this so intuitive for me, but not for an LLM?". Our human-ability to abstract things is underrated.
- fchollet 1y agoThere have been some human studies on ARC 1 previously, I expect there will be more in the future. See this paper from 2021, which was one of the earliest works in this direction: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.05823 https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.05823
- danpalmer 1y ago> and was the only benchmark to pinpoint the exact moment in late 2024 when AI moved beyond pure memorization This is self-referential, the benchmark pinpointed the time when AI went from memorization to problem solving, because the benchmark requires problem solving to complete. How do we know it requires problem solving skills? Because memorization-only LLMs can't do it but humans can. I think ARC are producing some great benchmarks, and I think they probably are pushing forward the state of the art, however I don't think they identified anything particular with o3, at least they don't seem to have proven a step change.
- fchollet 1y agoThe reason these tasks require fluid intelligence is because they were designed this way -- with task uniqueness/novelty as the primary goal. ARC 1 was released long before in-context learning was identified in LLMs (and designed before Transformer-based LLMs existed), so the fact that LLMs can't do ARC was never a design consideration. It just turned out this way, which confirmed our initial assumption.
- YeGoblynQueenne 1y ago>> The reason these tasks require fluid intelligence is because they were designed this way -- with task uniqueness/novelty as the primary goal. That's in no way different than claiming that LLMs understand language, or reason, etc, because they were designed that way. Neural nets of all sorts have been beating benchmarks since forever, e.g. there's a ton of language understanding benchmarks pretty much all saturated by now (GLUE, SUPERGLUE ULTRASUPERAWESOMEGLUE ... OK I made that last one up) but passing them means nothing about the ability of neural net-based systems to understand language, regardless of how much their authors designed them to test language understanding. Failing a benchmark also doesn't mean anything. A few years ago, at the first Kaggle competition, the entries were ad-hoc and amateurish. The first time a well-resourced team tried ARC (OpenAI) they ran roughshod over it and now you have to make a new one. At some point you have to face the music: ARC is just another benchmark, destined to be beat in good time whenever anyone makes a concentrated effort at it and still prove nothing about intelligence, natural or artificial.
- iandanforth 1y agoI'd very much like to see VLAs get in the game with ARC. When I solve these puzzles I'm imagining myself move blocks around. Much of the time I'm treating these as physics simulations with custom physics per puzzle. VLAs are particularly well suited to the kind of training and planning which might unlock solutions here.
- neom 1y agoMaybe this is a really stupid question but I've been curious... are LLMs based on... "Neuronormativity"? Like, what neurology is an LLM based on? Would we get any benefit from looking at neurodiverse processing styles?
- dcre 1y agoIt’s kind of a silly question in that the neural architecture of neural nets is really only loosely inspired by neurology, and that basic vague neurology is shared by neurotypical people and neurodivergent people and animals and even bugs.
- ZeroTalent 1y agoAlso we barely understand how cognition works, AFAIK.
- jwpapi 1y agoDid we run out of textual tasks that are easy for humans but hard for AI, or why are the examples all graphics?
- fchollet 1y agoYou can easily convert these tasks to token strings. The reason why ARC does not use language as part of its format is that it seeks to minimize the amount of prior knowledge needed to approach the tasks, so as to focus on fluid intelligence as opposed to acquired knowledge. All ARC tasks are built entirely on top of "Core Knowledge" priors, the kind of elementary knowledge that a small child has already mastered and that is possessed universally by all humans.
- jwpapi 1y agoCan you explain to me? Would the token strings be as easy to solve for humans as well? Or let me ask differently. Can we still design text questions that are easy for humans and tough for AI?
- timonofathens 1y agoARC tasks are language-independent
- falcor84 1y agoI spent half an hour playing with these now at https://arcprize.org/play https://arcprize.org/play and it's fun, but I must say that they are not "easy". So far I eventually solved all of the ones I've gone through, but several took me significantly more than the 2 tries allotted. I wonder if this can be shown to be a valid IQ test, and if so, what IQ would a person need to solve e.g. 90% of them in 1 or 2 tries.
- colordrops 1y agoYes, I looked that these and thought about what percentage of humans could even solve these. It seems that, unless average humans are not considered generally intelligence, the test for general intelligence should be passable by most humans.
- cubefox 1y agoI would argue that also small children and even most animals count as "general" intelligences. Animals are much less intelligent than grown humans, but that doesn't mean they are less general. Just like, say, AlphaGo 2 is more intelligent but not more general than AlphaGo 1. Or Qwen 32B vs Qwen 7B. Model or brain size alone doesn't determine generality. Generality is more a question of architecture.
- colordrops 1y agoIs there a formal or at least clear consensus definition of "general" intelligence? I assume it involves some level of autonomy and ability to manage novel situations.
- cubefox 1y agoThere is no consensus on this. > I assume it involves some level of autonomy and ability to manage novel situations. Yeah. Also operating in real-time (robotics) and being able to process sensory data only, instead of relying on preprocessed data like text tokens.
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- Davidzheng 1y agoProbably openai will be >60% in three months if not immediately with these $1000/question level compute (which is the way tbh we should throw compute whenever possible that's the main advantage of silicon intelligence)
- Davidzheng 1y agoTheir own admission that intelligence is a meaningless metric without bound on compute is one of the main reasons AI will overpower human intelligence soon. Simple scaling is very effective.
- ttol 1y agoHad to give https://reasoner.com https://reasoner.com a try on ARC-AGI-2. Reasoner passed on first try. “Correct!” (See screenshot that shows one rated “hard” -- https://www.linkedin.com/posts/waynechang_tried-reasoner-on-arc-prizes-just-released-activity-7310115134092312576-NGQr https://www.linkedin.com/posts/waynechang_tried-reasoner-on-...)
- nneonneo 1y agoNitpick: “Public” is misspelled as “pubic” in several of the captions on that page.
- carra 1y agoMaybe realizing those things is the actual test?
- anshumankmr 1y agoOof its still there... but yeah typos happen lol
- fastball 1y agoI don't know if this was a design goal, but I just did the first 10 Arc-AGI-2 public eval (hard) puzzles, and found them much more enjoyable (as a human) than any of the Arc-AGI-1 puzzles. That said the grid/puzzle editor is still a little clunky – would be nice to be able to drag-to-paint and have an adjustable brush size.