There's a difficult balance between letting the model simply memorize inputs, and forcing it to figure out a generalisations.
When a model is "lossy" and can't reproduce the data by copying, it's forced to come up with rules to synthesise the answers instead, and this is usually the "intelligent" behavior we want. It should be forced to learn how multiplication works instead of storing every combination of numbers as a fact.
You're not answering the question. Grok 4 also performs better on the semi-private evaluation sets for ARC-AGI-1 and ARC-AGI-2. It's across-the-board better.
If these things are truly exhibiting general reasoning, why do the same models do significantly worse on ARC-AGI-2, which is practically identical to ARC-AGI-1?
It's not identical. ARC-AGI-2 is more difficult - both for AI and humans. In ARC-AGI-1 you kept track of one (or maybe two) kinds of transformations or patterns. In ARC-AGI-2 you are dealing with at least three, and the transformation interact with one another in more complex ways.
Reasoning isn't an on-off switch. It's a hill that needs climbing. The models are getting better at complex and novel tasks.
The 100.0% you see there just verifies that all the puzzles got solved by at least 2 people on the panel. That was calibrated to be so for ARC-AGI-2. The human panel averages for ARC-AGI-1 and ARC-AGI-2 are 64.2% and 60% respectively. Not a huge difference, sure, but it is there.
I've played around with both, yes, I'd also personally say that v2 is harder. Overall a better benchmark. ARC-AGI-3 will be a set of interactive games. I think they're moving in the right direction if they want to measure general reasoning.
When a model is "lossy" and can't reproduce the data by copying, it's forced to come up with rules to synthesise the answers instead, and this is usually the "intelligent" behavior we want. It should be forced to learn how multiplication works instead of storing every combination of numbers as a fact.
Compression is related to intelligence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity