LMArena, a crowdsourced AI comparison platform, secured $150 million in a Series A round, valuing the company at $1.7 billion. Backed by Felicis, UC Investments and leading venture firms, the funding will expand its commercial AI Evaluation service, which provides enterprises with real‑world, human‑anchored model rankings. By letting users compare anonymized responses and vote for the better answer, LMArena offers a dynamic alternative to static benchmarks. The approach has attracted both praise for delivering trust signals and criticism over potential bias and manipulation, highlighting the growing demand for richer AI assessment tools as models proliferate. Leer más →

The Laude Institute announced its inaugural Slingshots grant program, providing funding, compute power, and product support to 15 AI research projects focused on evaluation. The cohort includes initiatives such as the Terminal Bench coding benchmark, an updated ARC-AGI project, Formula Code from Caltech and UT Austin, and Columbia's BizBench. SWE‑Bench co‑founder John Boda Yang leads the new CodeClash competition framework. Recipients are expected to deliver tangible outcomes like startups or open‑source codebases, while the institute warns against benchmarks becoming overly company‑specific. Leer más →