What are MMLU, HumanEval, and GSM8K, and how do you interpret LLM benchmark scores?
Plenty of people cite benchmark numbers; almost nobody reads them carefully. What shows depth is explaining what each one measures and why leaderboard figures outrun real-world skill. The question the interviewer is saving is how you would spot contamination.
Updated Sep 2026 · Grounded in real GenAI, LLM, and AI/ML engineering interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
Plenty of people cite benchmark numbers; almost nobody reads them carefully. What shows depth is explaining what each one measures and why leaderboard figures outrun real-world skill. The question the interviewer is saving is how you would spot contamination.
Lead with where the obvious approach breaks, because that is the judgment they are screening for — most candidates jump straight to the happy path and lose the room.
Then walk the failure back through the pipeline in order, naming the one metric the customer's exec sponsor actually cares about before you propose the fix.
