Jack Gallant

Yiyou Sun, Xinyang Han, Weichen Zhang et al.

Recent AI systems have achieved strong results on a wide range of benchmarks, yet these gains have not translated into economically meaningful deployment across many professional domains. We argue that this gap is largely an evaluation problem: widely used benchmarks lack sustained performance measurement on real and economically valuable workflows. This paper introduces Agents' Last Exam (ALE), a benchmark designed to evaluate AI agents on long-horizon, economically valuable, real-world tasks with verifiable outcomes. Developed in collaboration with 250+ industry experts, ALE covers non-physical industries defined with reference to O*NET / SOC 2018 (the U.S. federal occupational taxonomy). It is organized around a task taxonomy with 55 subfields grouped into 13 industry clusters covering 1K+ tasks. Current results show that the hardest tier remains far from saturated: across mainstream harness and backbone configurations, the average full pass rate is 2.6%. ALE is designed as a living benchmark: its task pool grows continuously as new workflows and industries are onboarded. More broadly, ALE is intended not merely as another leaderboard, but as an instrument for closing the gap between benchmark success and GDP-relevant impact.

Polina Golland, Jack Gallant, Greg Hager et al.

The history of computer science and brain sciences are intertwined. In his unfinished manuscript "The Computer and the Brain," von Neumann debates whether or not the brain can be thought of as a computing machine and identifies some of the similarities and differences between natural and artificial computation. Turing, in his 1950 article in Mind, argues that computing devices could ultimately emulate intelligence, leading to his proposed Turing test. Herbert Simon predicted in 1957 that most psychological theories would take the form of a computer program. In 1976, David Marr proposed that the function of the visual system could be abstracted and studied at computational and algorithmic levels that did not depend on the underlying physical substrate. In December 2014, a two-day workshop supported by the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) and the National Science Foundation's Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate (NSF CISE) was convened in Washington, DC, with the goal of bringing together computer scientists and brain researchers to explore these new opportunities and connections, and develop a new, modern dialogue between the two research communities. Specifically, our objectives were: 1. To articulate a conceptual framework for research at the interface of brain sciences and computing and to identify key problems in this interface, presented in a way that will attract both CISE and brain researchers into this space. 2. To inform and excite researchers within the CISE research community about brain research opportunities and to identify and explain strategic roles they can play in advancing this initiative. 3. To develop new connections, conversations and collaborations between brain sciences and CISE researchers that will lead to highly relevant and competitive proposals, high-impact research, and influential publications.