It’s worth also comparing Qwen 3.5, it’s a very strong model. Different benchmarks give different results, but in general Qwen 3.5, GLM 5, and Kimi K2.5 are all excellent models, and not too far from current SOTA models in capability/intelligence. In my own non-coding tests, they were better than Gemini 3.1 flash. They’re comparable to the best American models from 6 months ago.

I used qwen 3.5 plus in production, it was really good at instruction following and tool calling.

we used Kimi 2.5, its really good

While I like these models, if you're getting similar results to SOTA models from 6 months ago, I have to question how far you pushed those models 6 months ago. It is really easy to find scenarios were these models really underperform. They take far more advanced harnesses to perform reasonably (and hence the linked project). It's possible to get good results out of them, but it takes a lot of extra work.

I badly want to shift more of my work to them, and I'm finding ways of shifting more lower-level loads to them regularly, but they're really not there yet for anything complex.

Interesting benchmark. It is notable that Gemini-3-Flash outperforms 3.1 Pro. My experience using Flash via Opencode over the past month suggests it is quite underrated.

Needless to say, benchmarks are limited and impressions vary widely by problem domain, harness, written language, and personal preference (simplicity vs detail, tone, etc.). If personal experience is the only true measure, as with wine, solving this discovery gap is an interesting challenge (LLM sommelier!), even if model evolution eventually makes the choice trivial. (I prefer Gemini 3 for its wide knowledge, Sonnet 4.6 for balance, and GLM-5 for simplicity.)

Wild benchmark. Opus 4.6 is ranked #29, Gemini 3 Flash is #1, front of Pro.

I'm not saying it's bad, but it's definitely different than the others.

The main reason is that Claude models tend to ignore instructions. There is a failure example on the Methodology page.

> It is not my fault if Claude outputs something like "*1*, *1*", adding markdown highlighting, when most other models respect the required format correctly.

Yuck. At that point don't publish a benchmark, explains why their results are useless too.

-

Edit since I'm not able to reply to the below comment:

"I want structured output from a model that supports structured output but will not enable structured output, nor ask for an existing format like XML or JSON" is not really an interesting thing to benchmark, and that's reflected in how you have Gemini 2.5 Flash beating GPT-5.4.

I really hope no one reads that list and thinks it's an AI leaderboard in any generalizable sense.

Why not? I described this in more detail in other comments.

Even when using structured output, sometimes you want to define how the data should be displayed or formatted, especially for cases like chat bots, article writing, tool usage, calling external api's, parsing documents, etc.

Most models get this right. Also, this is just one failure mode of Claude.

Like I said in the edit, when people want specific formatting they ask for well known formats: Markdown, XML, JSON

I don't even need to debate if the benchmark is useful, it doesn't pass a sniff test: GPT-5.4 is not worse than Gemini 2.5 Flash in any way that matters to most users. In your benchmark it's meaningfully worse.

The questions do ask specifically to respond with the answer only, with an example format given in many cases.

Note that all reasoning models are tested with "medium" reasoning.

The benchmarks are questions/data processing tasks that an average user will likely ask, not coding questions (I didn't add any coding tests yet).

Gemini models also tend to be very consistent. Asking the same question will likely give the same result.

The two models you mention scored the same, the only difference is that Gemini was better at domain-specific questions (i.e. you ask something quite technical/niche).

If Gemini 2.5 Flash and GPT 5.4 perform the same for you, I'm glad.

It's not a useful finding for the rest of the world, and I sure hope non-technical people aren't being taken in by a steaming pile that implies those similarly performing LLMs (and many other ridiculous findings), but c'est la vie.

Now a days anyone can vibecode a "benchmark" with 0 understanding of the domain, what more should I expect?

Not really related, but does anybody know if somebody's tracking same models performance on some benchmarks over time? Sometimes I feel like I'm being A/B tested.

Oh, I didn't think about this, that's a good idea. I also feel generally model performance changes over time (usually it gets worse).

The problem with doing this is cost. Constsntly testing a lot of models on a large dataset can get really costly.

Yeah, good tests are associated with cost. I'd like to see benchmarks on big messy codebases and how models perform on a clearly defined task that's easy to verify.

I was thinking that tokens spent in such case could also be an interesting measure, but some agent can do small useful refactoring. Although prompt could specify to do the minimal change required to achieve the goal.

I can't imagine anyone looking at this benchmark without laughing. It's so disconnected.

GLM 5 here is significantly better than GPT-5.4

It's 8.3 vs 8.1, I wouldn't call that significantly better.

I think GLM got a bit in front, because on some tests that both got wrong, GLM did sometimes (inconsistently) respond with the correct answer.

That being said, yes, in this case probably with more and more tests added, gpt-5.4 would edge in front, especially if a coding would be added (there are no coding tests yet).