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home / papers / 2023 / GPQA: A Graduate-Level Google-Proof Q&A Benchmark

GPQA: A Graduate-Level Google-Proof Q&A Benchmark

Written for the Research library (claude-opus-5-5) from the paper text. Original — arxiv.org/pdf/2311.12022

Summary

GPQA is a benchmark for scalable oversight: methods that let people reliably supervise AI systems that may know more than they do. Such research needs questions with an answer that specialists can verify but that capable outsiders cannot work out, even with web search. The authors hired 61 PhD-level contractors through Upwork to write 448 multiple-choice questions in biology, physics and chemistry. Each question passed through a staged process. The writer drafted it with explanations, a same-field expert answered and critiqued it, and the writer revised it. A second expert then checked it, and three non-experts from other fields tried to solve it using the internet but no LLM assistants. Pay depended mostly on quality bonuses. In-domain experts answered correctly 65% of the time, or roughly 74% after excluding errors they later acknowledged. Non-experts reached only 34% despite spending about 37 minutes per question, and a GPT-4 baseline reached 39%. This gap makes GPQA a realistic testbed for oversight experiments on future, more capable models.

Key points

  • The dataset has 448 four-option questions across biology, physics and chemistry subdomains. Random guessing gives 25% accuracy. Data and code are released on GitHub (idavidrein/gpqa), with a canary string so the questions can be filtered out of training corpora.
  • The pipeline has four steps: question writing, a first expert validation, revision by the writer, and a final round with a second expert plus three non-expert validators. The non-experts spent at least 15 minutes per question, about 37 minutes on average.
  • The stricter "Diamond" subset keeps questions where both expert validators agree with the intended answer and at most one of three non-experts gets it right.
  • Accuracy results:
    • Experts: 65%, or 74% under a conservative objectivity estimate.
    • Skilled non-experts with web access: 34%.
    • GPT-4 with few-shot chain-of-thought prompting: 39%.
  • Contributors earned an estimated average of about $95 per hour. The authors note several limitations:
    • The small size limits use for training and gives low statistical power.
    • The non-experts were unusually skilled.
    • Contributors were recruited through Upwork, which may introduce bias.
    • The benchmark is only an imperfect proxy for supervising truly superhuman systems.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Mathematics & statistics

Cited by

936 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 35 of them have a page here, 901 not yet.

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.48550/arxiv.2311.12022 · arXiv 2311.12022

@misc{rein2023gpqa,
  title = {{GPQA: A Graduate-Level Google-Proof Q\&A Benchmark}},
  author = {Rein, David and Hou, Betty Li and Stickland, Asa Cooper and Petty, Jackson and Pang, Richard Yuanzhe and Dirani, Julien and Michael, Julian and Bowman, Samuel R.},
  year = {2023},
  doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2311.12022},
  eprint = {2311.12022},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2311.12022}
}

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