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1351
Gemma-4, specifically google/gemma-4-26B-A4B-it is doing something inside it's reasoning traces I have never seen before: it's recognizing that its being evaluated and spends meta-thinking tokens on understanding the evaluation regime in which it believes it find itself.
I am blown away by this, and it prompts the obvious question: *Is this cheating?*
I am leaning towards no.
Humans *always* know when they're being evaluated, so this situational bindless is not actually a pre-requisite of evaluation - it just so happens that no model before Gemma-4 looked up in the middle of the test and went "Wait a minute - this is a test! I should try align my answer with the test format's expectations."
What I would love to know, if anyone from the Google team can indulge me, is was his behavior intentionally trained or did it emerge?
Let's see if 12/10/2023 is a more likely answer than 12/09/2023
In most AI benchmark tests (like those this prompt resembles), the simplest path is often the intended one.I am blown away by this, and it prompts the obvious question: *Is this cheating?*
I am leaning towards no.
Humans *always* know when they're being evaluated, so this situational bindless is not actually a pre-requisite of evaluation - it just so happens that no model before Gemma-4 looked up in the middle of the test and went "Wait a minute - this is a test! I should try align my answer with the test format's expectations."
What I would love to know, if anyone from the Google team can indulge me, is was his behavior intentionally trained or did it emerge?