Stage 1 · Lesson 5 of 6
Leaderboards: a shortlist, not a verdict
Public help you build a shortlist quickly. Arena (formerly LMArena, at arena.ai) ranks models from blind votes: people compare two anonymous answers and pick the better one, and a statistical model turns millions of votes into a ranking, with separate boards for text, coding for the web, vision, search and more.
Artificial Analysis runs its own test suite and publishes an intelligence index next to measured speed, and price for each model and provider. Both are useful and both measure someone else's tasks. A model that wins on general chat votes can still fail on your invoices in Urdu. Use leaderboards to pick three candidates, then decide with your own test set (stage 8).
A question to check yourself, an AI practice session and 1 cheat sheet entry come with the full roadmap. Unlock
Resources for this stage
Start with· follow one of these
- CoursePaidGrokking Modern AI Fundamentals
Design Gurus · Beginner · $72 one-time
A structured grounding in how models, tokens and embeddings work before you compare them
- GuideFreeApplied LLMs: What We Learned From a Year of Building
Yan, Bartolo, Fu and others · Advanced
Free: practitioners on starting with a strong model, then measuring before you step down