@Scale
Because AI model capabilities have outpaced measurement for the first time in computing history, evaluating autonomous agents requires replacing static benchmarks with interactive, multi-step environments.
AI-assisted summary of Observability: Role of Evals, Benchmarks & Data in Frontier AI | Alex Ratner from Snorkel AI — original source. Check the original for full context.
Source published:
Key ideas
- Frontier AI development has outpaced evaluation, inverting traditional machine learning into an empirical science where logging alone is useless without rigorous output measurement. (2:37)
- Software benchmarks are rapidly shifting along three axes—environment complexity, autonomy horizons, and output complexity—moving past saturated metrics like HumanEval (95%) toward brutal tests like ProgramBench (3% accuracy). (9:35)
- In agentic systems, defining the evaluation and training data specification essentially defines the majority of the product specification itself. (13:51)
- Snorkel AI has committed approximately $3 million to an open benchmark grants program, supporting around 20 upcoming public benchmarks targeting agent failure modes. (19:05)
Detailed notes
## Background Published on YouTube by the @Scale channel on June 19, 2026, this keynote features Snorkel AI Co-Founder and CEO Alex Ratner addressing the @Scale Conference. The session focuses on overcoming the AI evaluation gap by establishing enduring benchmarks and complex environments to measure agentic models across environment complexity, autonomy horizons, and output complexity.
## TL;DR Alex Ratner argues that model development has rapidly outpaced our ability to measure frontier AI, shifting computer science into an empirical discipline where static, saturated benchmarks like HumanEval fail to provide meaningful signal. To achieve genuine agent observability, evaluation must expand across three compounding vectors: dynamic environment complexity, extended autonomy horizons, and verifiable output complexity. Achieving this requires fundamentally redefining evaluation data from static text prompts into complete, interactive operating environments equipped with rich verifiers and feedback harnesses. Highlighting emerging evaluations like TerminalBench, SlopCodeBench, and a $3 million Snorkel-backed open grant program, Ratner outlines an engineering roadmap for diagnosing and training reliable autonomous agents.
## Atmosphere & style The presentation carries the brisk, authoritative cadence of an experienced systems researcher turned founder, blending academic rigor with pragmatic industry insight. Ratner speaks with earnest clarity and intellectual urgency, using touches of Silicon Valley wit alongside concrete software engineering realities to demystify agent hype. It feels like an insider briefing on frontier AI infrastructure, transitioning seamlessly from theoretical shifts to hands-on pipeline blueprints and an open call to action for the broader research ecosystem.
## Bulletin - [02:37](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX79X61Jonk&t=157s) Frontier AI development has outpaced evaluation, inverting traditional machine learning into an empirical science where logging alone is useless without rigorous output measurement. - [09:35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX79X61Jonk&t=575s) Software benchmarks are rapidly shifting along three axes—environment complexity, autonomy horizons, and output complexity—moving past saturated metrics like HumanEval (95%) toward brutal tests like ProgramBench (3% accuracy). - [13:51](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX79X61Jonk&t=831s) In agentic systems, defining the evaluation and training data specification essentially defines the majority of the product specification itself. - [19:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX79X61Jonk&t=1145s) Snorkel AI has committed approximately $3 million to an open benchmark grants program, supporting around 20 upcoming public benchmarks targeting agent failure modes.
## Key takeaways - [00:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX79X61Jonk&t=5s) The evaluation gap is the primary bottleneck in generative AI, as the ability to develop models has outpaced the ability to reliably measure them. - [00:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX79X61Jonk&t=5s) Observability requires more than systems logging and tracing; infrastructure telemetry is ineffective without reliable scoring, red teaming, and benchmark rubrics. - [02:37](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX79X61Jonk&t=157s) AI has shifted from theoretical engineering with clean guarantees into an empirical science driven by diagnostic measurement and experimentation. - [05:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX79X61Jonk&t=316s) Next-generation benchmarks must evaluate along three critical dimensions: environment complexity, autonomy horizon, and output verifiability. - [09:35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX79X61Jonk&t=575s) Early coding benchmarks like HumanEval have saturated at around 95%, while new suites like ProgramBench expose frontier models down to a 3% accuracy rate. - [09:35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX79X61Jonk&t=575s) The compounding surface area of expanding task environments and extended sequence lengths outweighs gains in model sample efficiency. - [12:03](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX79X61Jonk&t=723s) Data in the agentic era must shift from static chatbot prompts to fully interactive environments with file trees, live tools, and APIs. - [12:03](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX79X61Jonk&t=723s) Verifiable deliverables and rich execution harnesses serve a dual purpose as evaluation benchmarks and dense reward signals for reinforcement learning. - [13:51](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX79X61Jonk&t=831s) In agentic product development, the data specification functions as the majority of the actual product specification. - [16:33](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX79X61Jonk&t=993s) Effective benchmark design requires purposefully targeting the specific failure modes and edge cases of frontier agents rather than broad success metrics. - [16:33](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX79X61Jonk&t=993s) SlopCodeBench tests an agent's ability to navigate mid-task specification drift without producing architectural cruft or degraded code. - [16:33](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX79X61Jonk&t=993s) UC Berkeley's Continual Learning Bench measures whether autonomous agents can retain procedural insights and compound efficiency across sequential tasks. - [19:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX79X61Jonk&t=1145s) Snorkel AI committed around $3 million to open benchmark grants to fund academic and open-source measurement environments.
## Detailed walkthrough ### [00:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX79X61Jonk&t=5s) The AI Evaluation Gap and Agent Observability
Alex Ratner, co-founder and CEO of Snorkel AI, introduces the core mission of his organization: operating as a frontier lab dedicated to creating datasets and environments for evaluating, tuning, and training artificial intelligence models. The central thesis of the presentation is closing the "evaluation gap" in generative AI, which serves as one of the most critical bottlenecks in achieving genuine agent observability.
Ratner contextualizes the team's perspective with over a decade of research originating in academia. The work began at Stanford University alongside co-founder Professor Chris Ré, followed by Ratner's lab at the University of Washington (UW), generating more than 200 peer-reviewed publications focused on data-centric AI and benchmark creation.
Observing autonomous agents is fundamentally a massive systems and scientific challenge. While standard observability involves tracking telemetry, logging tool calls, and monitoring actions across increasingly broad attack surfaces, logging alone is insufficient without reliable evaluation frameworks. Agent traces and outputs must be evaluated through diverse methods: - Spot checks, red-teaming exercises, and user interviews - Formal benchmarks containing concrete tasks, golden reference answers, and automated scoring mechanisms - Rigorous data pipelines capable of verifying whether an agent acts reliably, safely, and correctly
```mermaid flowchart LR accTitle: Agent Observability to Evaluation Pipeline accDescr: High-level overview of telemetry capture flowing through measurement mechanisms to actionable benchmark evaluation. subgraph Capture["Telemetry & Systems"] A["Agent Actions & Tool Use"] --> B["Monitoring & Traces"] end subgraph Measurement["Evaluation Layer"] B --> C["Red Teaming & Spot Checks"] B --> D["Formal Benchmarks"] D --> E["Golden Answers & Rubrics"] end subgraph Outcome["Goal"] E --> F["Safe & Reliable Agent Deployment"] end ```
[02:37](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX79X61Jonk&t=157s) The Flip from Theoretical AI to Empirical Science
Ratner highlights a historic turning point: for arguably the first time in the history of AI and computer science, the ability to develop models has outpaced the ability to measure them. In traditional machine learning, evaluating a classifier was straightforward—collecting 100 ground-truth examples to detect a cat versus a dog (or "hot dog, not hot dog", referencing the famous *Silicon Valley* joke) made grading a simple matter of computing test-set accuracy before optimizing the model.
Today, this dynamic has inverted. Model capabilities are advancing faster than researchers can build high-quality datasets to test them at the frontier. Standard benchmarks suffer from rapid saturation; model cards show scores of 80% to 90%+ in coding or computer use, yet these same agents break down in complex, real-world deployments. Infrastructure logging and trace collection become completely useless if practitioners lack the measurement tools to verify output quality on frontier tasks.
Consequently, AI has evolved from a theoretical engineering discipline governed by clean mathematical theory into an empirical science. Because frontier models and agents have grown far too complex for simple theoretical guarantees, progress now depends on empirical experimentation, reliable measurement, and diagnostic benchmarks that pinpoint exactly where systems succeed or fail.
[05:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX79X61Jonk&t=316s) The Three Dimensions of Next-Generation Benchmarks
To address this evaluation gap, Ratner outlines three foundational axes that define the next generation of LLM and agent benchmarks:
```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: Three Axes of Frontier Agent Benchmarks accDescr: The three key dimensions defining next-generation benchmarks: environment complexity, autonomy horizon, and output complexity. subgraph FrontierSpace["Frontier Evaluation Dimensions"] Env["1. Environment Complexity<br/>(Single prompt vs. Full enterprise repo/Slack)"] Horiz["2. Autonomy Horizon<br/>(One-shot answer vs. Long-running, dynamic steps)"] Out["3. Output Complexity<br/>(Multiple choice vs. Multi-week verified software artifact)"] end ```
1. **Environment Complexity (Input Richness):** Evaluating how dynamic and rich the operating environment is. While early coding tasks relied on isolated paragraph-length problem descriptions, modern software engineering agents must navigate miniature enterprise environments containing complex repositories, tool harnesses, execution environments, and dynamic organizational inputs (such as changing requirements from product managers via Slack).
2. **Autonomy Horizon (Sequence Length and Dynamism):** Measuring how long and independently an agent can operate across extended workflows. Tasks are expanding from single-turn code generation to replicating full application architectures—such as Meta-affiliated research on *ProgramBench*, which demands multi-step execution mirroring weeks of human effort. Real-world projects are never linear; agents must handle evolving constraints, mid-task goal changes, and dynamic error recovery.
3. **Output Complexity (Deliverable Verifiability):** Evaluating sophisticated, open-ended deliverables. Unlike a 101-level programming exercise that is easily validated with one or two unit tests, evaluating an entire generated software product requires comprehensive rubrics, sophisticated verifiers, and multi-layered testing harnesses. Verifiable output measurement is crucial not only for accurate evaluation, but also as the reward signal for reinforcement learning (RL) and post-training alignment.
Even in domains widely considered mature or saturated, such as software engineering, there remains massive, exponentially growing white space across these combined dimensions of sequence length and input/output complexity.
[09:35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX79X61Jonk&t=575s) The Evaluation Gap: From Saturated Coding Benchmarks to Staff-Level Architecture
The frontier of software engineering evaluations is shifting rapidly from toy problem-solving to architecting entire software systems, leaving a massive amount of unmeasured white space in agent capability. Foundational benchmarks like HumanEval have effectively saturated at roughly 95% performance, offering little remaining discriminative signal. In response, subsequent benchmarks were created to push the boundary: TerminalBench 2.0—which Snorkel AI helped fund and collaborate on—already sees performance hovering around 82%, while the upcoming TerminalBench 3.0 will test significantly harder challenges with an anticipated failure rate exceeding 80%. Other demanding evaluations, such as ProgramBench (developed by a team now partly at Meta), show frontier agents scraping by at a meager 3% accuracy rate. Snorkel is actively working on a new, unannounced benchmark designed to test staff-engineer-level system architecture challenges.
```mermaid flowchart LR accTitle: Evolution of Coding Benchmarks accDescr: Progression of benchmark difficulty from HumanEval to staff-level architecture tasks. subgraph Saturated["Early Benchmarks"] HE["HumanEval<br/>(~95% accuracy)"] end subgraph Intermediate["Terminal Agents"] TB2["TerminalBench 2.0<br/>(~82% accuracy)"] TB3["TerminalBench 3.0<br/>(>80% failure rate)"] end subgraph Frontier["Complex Systems"] PB["ProgramBench<br/>(~3% accuracy)"] ARCH["Staff-Level Systems<br/>(In Development)"] end HE --> TB2 TB2 --> TB3 TB3 --> PB PB --> ARCH ```
Even within well-trodden spaces like code generation, the challenge surface area is compounding along three distinct axes: extending autonomy horizons (longer sequence lengths), expanding input environment complexity, and increasing output sophistication. While training algorithms and foundation models continue to show improved sample efficiency, Ratner argues that the "double exponential" of expanding task complexity and operational surface area will overwhelmingly dominate any gains in model efficiency. To keep pace with this capability frontier, the AI community must produce increasingly realistic, high-fidelity synthetic and real-world evaluation environments rather than relying on static, short-horizon tests.
- **HumanEval:** Approximately saturated at 95% completion rate. - **TerminalBench 2.0:** Performance hovering around 82%. - **TerminalBench 3.0 (Upcoming):** Anticipated failure rate of 80%+. - **ProgramBench:** Currently yields only a 3% accuracy rate across leading models. - **The Core Driving Vector:** A tri-fold increase in autonomy horizons, environment complexity, and output verifiability.
---
[12:03](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX79X61Jonk&t=723s) Redefining Data: The Shift from Chatbot Prompts to Agent Environments
Moving into the agentic era requires fundamentally rethinking what constitutes evaluation and training "data." In the initial chatbot wave of generative AI, evaluation data was straightforward: a static prompt or question paired with an expected text response, scored against reference answers or human preference labels. In the agentic regime, however, these "test questions" transform into complex, multi-modal deliverables. A single evaluation instance is no longer a text snippet; it is an end-to-end task—such as architecting and implementing a production software artifact within an interactive environment.
Consequently, the evaluation payload must provide an entire operating world rather than just an input string. This includes domain-specific tools, file trees, documents, simulated personas, and live databases. Grading whether the agent succeeded cannot rely on simple string matching or basic heuristics; it demands rich intermediate verifiers, execution test harnesses, and nuanced grading rubrics that provide granular feedback not just at task completion, but continuously across hundreds of autonomous steps. These rich environments serve a dual purpose: they act as observational benchmarks to measure frontier models and supply the dense reward signals required for reinforcement learning and post-training.
---
[13:51](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX79X61Jonk&t=831s) The Lifecycle of Agentic Data and Environment Development
Building high-quality agentic evaluations requires an extensive, iterative engineering pipeline. It begins with rigorous scoping and calibration. Ratner highlights a core operating thesis: "the data spec is a majority of the product spec in the agentic world." Defining the tasks an agent should complete, the environments it must navigate, and the explicit standards for a high-quality output essentially defines the agentic product itself. Tasks and environments must then be co-designed in lockstep to mirror actual workflows.
```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: Agentic Benchmark Development Pipeline accDescr: Step-by-step pipeline for building and calibrating agentic benchmarks. A["1. Scope & Calibrate<br/>Data Spec = Product Spec"] --> B["2. Build Environments & Tasks<br/>Toolsets, EHRs, Docs, APIs"] B --> C["3. Run Agents & Discover Failures<br/>Identify edge cases & calibrate difficulty"] C --> D["4. Construct Rubrics & Verifiers<br/>Step-level & outcome rewards"] D --> E["5. Rigorous Review & Versioning<br/>Governance, packaging & standard tooling"] ```
Practical examples illustrate the domain-specific demands of this environment construction: - **Legal Deep Research (with Harvey):** Building realistic environments equipped with legal citation databases, case research tools, and statutory search capabilities to evaluate multi-step legal reasoning. - **Clinical Diagnostics:** Supplying agents with simulated patient vignettes, electronic health record (EHR) feeds, lab test histories, and diagnostic exploration tools.
Once tasks and environments are stood up, developers must actively run frontier agents against them to identify unexpected failure modes, calibrate difficulty, and build verifiable rubrics. Every payload component undergoes thorough review to weed out sub-par questions or surface nuanced edge cases that necessitate updating the original data specification. Finally, the suite is versioned and packaged under strict data governance protocols so it can operate as a reliable, reproducible evaluation harness.
---
[16:33](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX79X61Jonk&t=993s) Next-Generation Benchmarks: TerminalBench, SlopCodeBench, and Continual Learning
A critical principle of modern benchmark design is intentionally steering the task distribution toward the specific failure modes of frontier agents, rather than building broad tests that agents can easily ace. To catalyze research, Snorkel AI established an Open Benchmarks Grants program supporting projects that push these boundaries:
- **TerminalBench:** Provides autonomous agents with full terminal execution access. Rather than serving merely as a static scoreboard, it has functioned over the past year as an active guidepost for frontier labs to expose brittle execution paths and failure modes in terminal-based coding agents. - **SlopCodeBench:** Bearing an affectionate "PhD kind of grad school name" (humorously compared to the naming origins of Snorkel during Ratner's Stanford days), this benchmark measures how coding agents handle spec drift. In real software development, requirements shift mid-implementation; SlopCodeBench evaluates an agent's ability to refactor and accommodate changing specifications over long horizons without accumulating architectural "slop code," dead logic, and cruft. - **Continual Learning Bench:** Developed out of UC Berkeley, this suite evaluates an agent's capacity to learn across sequential tasks. Rather than treating every prompt as an isolated execution, it measures whether an agent retains procedural insights and compounds efficiency when moving sequentially from task one to task two to task three.
[19:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX79X61Jonk&t=1145s) Snorkel's Benchmark Grants Program and Open Ecosystem Support
Alex Ratner emphasizes a core principle underlying AI progress: models cannot improve from one task to another unless the community can rigorously measure that progress with high-quality data and robust benchmarks. For those whose interest was piqued by the benchmark examples shared during the talk, and who have ideas for benchmarks they want to develop in the open, Snorkel AI has established a dedicated benchmark grants program. Snorkel has already committed roughly $3 million toward this initiative and plans to increase that funding amount in the near future.
Currently, approximately 20 different benchmarks developed under this initiative are slated for announcement in the coming months, after which Snorkel plans to onboard an entirely new batch of projects. Ratner underscores that the team is deeply excited to support a broader proliferation of creative, well-architected benchmarks that live out in the open—spearheaded by academic and open-source teams with direct backing and tooling support from Snorkel AI.
- **Grant Program Commitment:** Approximately $3 million committed to date, with plans to increase funding shortly. - **Pipeline:** Roughly 20 open benchmarks scheduled for public release in the coming months, followed by a new cohort onboarding. - **Target Collaborators:** Academic researchers and open-source developers building public, reproducible benchmark environments.
[19:56](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX79X61Jonk&t=1196s) Closing the Evaluation Gap Across Agentic Frontiers
Concluding his presentation, Ratner reiterates the central thesis of the talk: closing the "evaluation gap" is not only critical for AI safety and utility, but it is also an intellectually rich challenge. The community has barely begun to traverse the full frontier of agent capabilities across the three vital dimensions: 1. **Environment complexity** (the dynamic, rich environments an agent must perceive and navigate) 2. **Autonomy horizon** (how far an agent can plan, execute, and course-correct independently) 3. **Output complexity** (how intricate, structured, and verifiable the final deliverables are)
Ultimately, Ratner stresses that reliable evaluation depends entirely on the underlying data and environments constructed to test these systems. Thanking the audience for their time, he invites further discussion and collaboration to build the next generation of frontier AI evaluations.
## Notable quotes > [02:37](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX79X61Jonk&t=157s) For arguably the first time in the history of AI and computer science, our ability to develop has outpaced our ability to measure. — Alex Ratner
> [02:37](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX79X61Jonk&t=157s) Logging is not observability if you can't evaluate whether the trace is good or bad or where it broke down. — Alex Ratner
> [02:37](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX79X61Jonk&t=157s) AI has flipped from being a theoretical engineering discipline to being an empirical science. — Alex Ratner
> [13:51](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX79X61Jonk&t=831s) The data spec is a majority of the product spec in the agentic world. — Alex Ratner
> [12:03](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX79X61Jonk&t=723s) A test question or an evaluation question is no longer a prompt; it's an entire task environment. — Alex Ratner
> [09:35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX79X61Jonk&t=575s) The double exponential of task complexity and operational surface area will overwhelmingly dominate any gains in model efficiency. — Alex Ratner
> [00:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX79X61Jonk&t=5s) Closing this evaluation gap is one of the most important problems facing the field. — Alex Ratner
> [19:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX79X61Jonk&t=1145s) We cannot improve from one task to another unless we can rigorously measure that progress with high-quality data and robust benchmarks. — Alex Ratner
## Mentioned Alex Ratner, Chris Ré, Snorkel AI, Stanford University, University of Washington, Meta, Harvey, UC Berkeley, HumanEval, TerminalBench, TerminalBench 2.0, TerminalBench 3.0, ProgramBench, SlopCodeBench, Continual Learning Bench, @Scale Conference
## Video description The excitement around agentic AI is real — backed by quantitative progress on model cards and genuine leaps in capability. But our ability to measure AI has been outpaced by our ability to develop it, and closing this evaluation gap is one of the most important problems facing the field. More enduring benchmarks are needed to advance the next vectors of capability and chart the path to reliable agents.
In this talk, Snorkel AI Co-Founder and CEO Alex Ratner will share insights from major research and benchmark collaborations on agentic coding and continual learning, along with practical tips from working with global frontier labs and leading academics. He'll focus on three dimensions where today's models most often break down, and where the next generation of benchmarks will need to deliver real signal: environment complexity (how dynamic and rich the operating world is), autonomy horizon (how far an agent can act independently), and output complexity (how sophisticated and verifiable the deliverable is).
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[Source](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX79X61Jonk)