LALatent SpaceDec 31, 2025· 24:02

[State of Evals] LMArena's $1.7B Vision — Anastasios Angelopoulos, LMArena

Anastasios Angelopoulos, founder of LMArena (now Arena), discusses the platform's $100M raise at a $1.7B valuation, its spin-out from Berkeley incubation by a16z's Anjney Midha, and its mission to be the industry's north star for real-world AI evaluation. He defends against the 'leaderboard illusion' paper, citing factual errors and reaffirming that models cannot pay to be on or off the public leaderboard. Arena funds inference costs for millions of monthly users, with 25% of its 5M+ users in software, and is expanding into occupational verticals (medicine, legal, creative) and multimodal video arenas. Key challenges include consumer retention, which improved with sign-in and persistent history, and moving off Gradio to React for better development. Angelopoulos calls for top talent in ML, product, and go-to-market to join the high-performance team.

  1. 0:00Intro
  2. 1:17Spinning Out
  3. 3:36$100M Raise
  4. 6:01Competitive Landscape
  5. 8:37Leaving Gradio
  6. 10:07Cohere Kerfuffle
  7. 15:51Platform North Star
  8. 19:45Community Secrets
  9. 21:42Join the Team

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Transcript

Intro0:00

Host0:03

Light in space like 2025. Recaps. Light in space like 2025. All right, we're here with Anastasios from Arena. I actually don't actually know your... Stars even aids, like very-

Anastasios Angelopoulos0:18

Angelopoulos.

Host0:18

Yeah. Every-

Anastasios Angelopoulos0:19

Yeah. There you go.

Host0:20

Um, congrats on all the success. You got the Arena handle.

Anastasios Angelopoulos0:23

Yeah, we did. We got the Arena handle. Thank you. Big branding moment.

Host0:27

Uh-

Anastasios Angelopoulos0:27

Really

Host0:27

... I mean, I, I think X is, like, being more commercial, so obviously you bought it.

Anastasios Angelopoulos0:31

Yes.

Host0:31

But, like, at least you, like-

Anastasios Angelopoulos0:32

Yes

Host0:32

... have a place to go to where you can be like, "Hey," like, "we really like this." But I do think, like, dropping LM-

Anastasios Angelopoulos0:39

Yeah

Host0:40

... has changed the, the, the, the, the feel of it. I don't-

Anastasios Angelopoulos0:43

Interesting

Host0:43

... know how you feel. Yeah.

Anastasios Angelopoulos0:44

Yeah. I don't know. I mean, the reason we kept the LM at the beginning is because we were, like, we started as LMSIST, right? Out of the LMSIST sort of con- you know, uh, conglomerate at Berkeley. So we decided to-

Host0:55

You know, those language models, yeah.

Anastasios Angelopoulos0:56

Exactly.

Host0:57

So.

Anastasios Angelopoulos0:57

So we wanted to maybe broaden a little bit. Yeah.

Host0:59

Yeah.

Anastasios Angelopoulos0:59

And, and we were the first Arena, so we feel like let's kinda try to own that.

Host1:03

Yeah.

Anastasios Angelopoulos1:03

So.

Host1:04

Last time you, we had you guys on, w- you hadn't really spun out yet, and we-

Anastasios Angelopoulos1:08

Right

Host1:08

... I had a call with Alessio, and I was like, "These guys are gonna start a company." And I didn't know, I think you actually were already started at the time.

Anastasios Angelopoulos1:15

I don't, I don't remember.

Host1:17

Uh-

Anastasios Angelopoulos1:17

Maybe

Spinning Out1:17

Host1:17

... 'cause Anj, I had a, I, I chatted with Anj.

Anastasios Angelopoulos1:21

Mm-hmm.

Host1:21

And he said he was your founding CEO.

Anastasios Angelopoulos1:24

He was indeed.

Host1:25

Uh-

Anastasios Angelopoulos1:25

Yeah

Host1:25

... which, like, people don't know.

Anastasios Angelopoulos1:27

Yeah.

Host1:27

The, the- Anj- Anj is a very interesting character. We, we have a podcast scheduled with him.

Anastasios Angelopoulos1:31

Yeah, yeah.

Host1:31

He does a lot more than normal VCs.

Anastasios Angelopoulos1:33

He does. He's been incredible to us.

Host1:35

You, you wanna shout out some stuff that he did?

Anastasios Angelopoulos1:37

Yeah, absolutely. So you know, the way the company started was as an incubation by Anj.

Host1:42

Yeah.

Anastasios Angelopoulos1:42

So what he did is he kinda, like, found us at Berkeley and picked us out of the basement and was like, "Hey, these guys seem like they're onto something," and started working with us really early, gave u- you know, gave us some grants.

He was not, you know, a16 was not the only one to do this. We also had a great grant from Sequoia. But, um, Anj was in particular quite, quite supportive of us and, you know, gave us some resources in order to continue building out Arena before we even were committed to s- to starting a business.

And in that capacity, he sort of like, you know, formed an entity for us and this and that. And you know, he was like, "Hey, you guys can walk away at any time if you guys don't wanna start a business."

I mean, it was really incredible, very aggressive investment move by him. Right? Because, uh, of course any money that he spent-

Host2:24

This is his business, yeah

Anastasios Angelopoulos2:24

... at the end of the day, like, we could walk away and give, leave him with nothing. But I think he knew wisely that the right thing for Arena was to start a company out of it. It was the only way that we could scale and that, you know, Weiling Yan and I would, would ultimately see that and be excited about doing it ourselves, which is, which, which ended up being the case.

Host2:42

Was there a moment for you where you were, uh... I'm sure you were debating it yourself.

Anastasios Angelopoulos2:46

Mm-hmm.

Host2:46

You had other opportunities. What was the deciding factor for you?

Anastasios Angelopoulos2:49

It became clear that the only way to scale what we were building was to build a company out of it, that the world really needed something like Arena, Arena being really a place to sort of measure, understand, and, and advance the frontier AI capabilities in, on real-world users, on real-world usage based on organic feedback.

And that in order to achieve the, the scale and, you know, distribution necessary and the quality, of course, of the platform necessary to, to do this effectively, we would need to start a company out of it. You know, we considered other options.

Are we gonna keep doing this as an academic project? Are we gonna do it as a nonprofit? Blah, blah, blah. But ultimately, under those c- constructs, we didn't feel like we'd have the resources necessary to accomplish our mission.

$100M Raise3:36

Host3:36

So you raised 100 million or-

Anastasios Angelopoulos3:38

Yep

Host3:39

... 80? 100.

Anastasios Angelopoulos3:40

100.

Host3:40

$100 million. That's a lot of resources.

Anastasios Angelopoulos3:42

It's great.

Host3:43

What-

Anastasios Angelopoulos3:43

Yeah

Host3:43

... what's it for?

Anastasios Angelopoulos3:44

Well, you know, obviously-

Host3:45

Asking on behalf of, like, everyone-

Anastasios Angelopoulos3:46

Of course

Host3:47

... who are like-

Anastasios Angelopoulos3:47

Yeah, everybody

Host3:47

... "Dude is in Arena."

Anastasios Angelopoulos3:48

How are you gonna spend your money?

Host3:50

Yeah.

Anastasios Angelopoulos3:50

Yeah. It's great.

Host3:51

Yeah.

Anastasios Angelopoulos3:51

Yeah. I-

Host3:52

Please tell.

Anastasios Angelopoulos3:52

First of all, we don't necessarily need to spend all that money, right? The, the purpose of money at a company is to give you cards to flip. It's to say, "Hey, you, you have, uh, enough resources necessary" and it's so that if your first bet fails, you can make another bet and another bet, of course.

So that's not to say that we're gonna spend all of it. Of course, you wanna spend things responsibly. Having said that, the platform's actually quite expensive to run. We fund all of the inference on the platform. You know, the way, the way that it works is the platform-

Host4:17

Like, you pay market rates? They don't give you discounts?

Anastasios Angelopoulos4:19

No, no, we get discounts, but they're, but they are, um, standard enterprise discounts.

Host4:25

Okay.

Anastasios Angelopoulos4:25

The same that would be given to any other customer of the LLMs.

Host4:28

And if you disclose any, uh, I don't know any numbers. I, I'll just, I see numbers of votes.

Anastasios Angelopoulos4:32

Uh-huh.

Host4:33

But, like, what's that in, like, monthly tokens or... I don't know.

Anastasios Angelopoulos4:36

I don't know about tokens.

Host4:37

Whatever you see.

Anastasios Angelopoulos4:37

You know, I'd have to back, back that out. But we have, like, you know, let's say, again, this is off the cuff, but I can safely say we have more than 5 million now, 5, 6 million. We have probably 250 million conversations that happen over the course of the platform.

We're on the order of, you know, mid 10s of millions of conversations every month that are happening on the platform. Um, it's actually quite a large, you know, it's one of the largest consumer platforms for LLMs. Of course, nothing is really comparing to ChatGPT, but- You know?

Host5:05

But no, still, I mean-

Anastasios Angelopoulos5:06

I think-

Host5:06

... the, the largest scaled ones. I would-

Anastasios Angelopoulos5:08

The benefit of this is that, like, it's actually quite a diverse population, so 25% of the people on our platform, for example, do software for a living still at this scale.

Host5:16

How do you know?

Anastasios Angelopoulos5:17

Because we, like, do all sorts of th- inst- we, we either survey them or we'll, like, analyze the prompt distribution that's coming to the platform. I'd be happy also to share more. We've done something called Expert Arena, which is, like, trying to understand the distribution of experts that are coming to the platform.

Host5:31

A lot of that can be, like, unauthenticated or whatever usage.

Anastasios Angelopoulos5:34

It is, but about half of our users now are logged in.

Host5:37

Yeah.

Anastasios Angelopoulos5:38

And so we have some ability to understand them, and, and we also have surveys that we run on the platform that tell us a bit more about who are the actual users.

Host5:47

Yeah.

Anastasios Angelopoulos5:47

Of course, there's always, like, response bias in surveys, so you have to take it with a grain of salt, but nonetheless.

Host5:52

And if you don't know Anastasios' background, like he's, he's the guy to correct for response bias.

Anastasios Angelopoulos5:56

Yeah. Well, okay.

Host5:57

Yeah.

Anastasios Angelopoulos5:57

There's a lot of, there's a lot of guys like that, and girls, so.

Host6:01

Guys and girls. Um, you're not the only player. Uh, there, there are this Artificial Analysis started-

Competitive Landscape6:01

Anastasios Angelopoulos6:05

Yep

Host6:05

... Arena. Yup AI.

Anastasios Angelopoulos6:07

Yep.

Host6:07

It's, like, some crypto people that, uh, started this.

Anastasios Angelopoulos6:10

Yep. Yep. Yep.

Host6:10

I don't know if you have a conversation with them on like, "Well, hey, this is our thing," or like, "Let's work together on something." I, I, I don't know if you've, uh, what the initial-

Anastasios Angelopoulos6:17

No

Host6:17

... was like.

Anastasios Angelopoulos6:17

You know, so I've talked to the Artificial... I've actually talked to both groups.

Host6:21

Yeah.

Anastasios Angelopoulos6:21

Both seem, you know, great people.

Host6:22

Am, am I missing any major players? It, it's just those two, right?

Anastasios Angelopoulos6:24

No.

Host6:24

Okay.

Anastasios Angelopoulos6:24

I think those, I don't know Yeah, I don't think so.

Host6:27

Okay.

Anastasios Angelopoulos6:28

I think those are, like, some of course large, depending on how you define the term.

Host6:32

Yeah.

Anastasios Angelopoulos6:33

Artificial analysis obviously has, like, huge, like, market mind share-

Host6:37

Yeah

Anastasios Angelopoulos6:37

... um, around the analysis of, of different AI systems.

Host6:42

Yeah, they told me they were just like, "We, we are gonna be Gartner of AI."

Anastasios Angelopoulos6:44

Yeah. That's, that's kind of their goal.

Host6:46

Right.

Anastasios Angelopoulos6:46

And I think they're going after that consulting market and so on.

Host6:48

Yeah.

Anastasios Angelopoulos6:49

But, uh, Artificial Analysis from what I understand is, like, a team of consultants that are doing this.

Host6:51

Yeah.

Anastasios Angelopoulos6:52

Seem like really, really nice guys, um, going after that, that particular market. It's different from our platform in the sense that their analysis is based on sort of, like, aggregating public benchmarks and turning those into analytics.

Host7:08

I- independently rerunning.

Anastasios Angelopoulos7:10

And independently rerunning.

Host7:11

Which matters.

Anastasios Angelopoulos7:11

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which matters, yes. Um, and, and, and, and using those in order to compile sort of reports and so on that, that educate the field on the performance of all these different models.

Host7:22

But they also have arenas.

Anastasios Angelopoulos7:24

They have arenas, but the arenas are not based on organic usage. Like, the, the thing that distinguishes our platform versus theirs is that the users are actually inputting their own use case. They're actually asking their own question, and that gives a, a level of realism-

Host7:40

Yeah

Anastasios Angelopoulos7:40

... that platform doesn't have.

Host7:41

Yeah.

Anastasios Angelopoulos7:41

Of course, they ha- they specialize in a slightly different thing, but I see those platforms kind of diverging in that sense.

Host7:46

Yeah.

Anastasios Angelopoulos7:47

Um-

Host7:47

Yeah. A- and sometimes it's like, it's the only way to do this. So like for example, for AA, their video arena is pre-generated videos. You can't enter in your own video prompts.

Anastasios Angelopoulos7:56

That's correct, but we're doing it organically.

Host7:57

Yeah.

Anastasios Angelopoulos7:58

Like-

Host7:58

Exactly

Anastasios Angelopoulos7:58

... and so I think-

Host7:59

But, uh, as a voter, it does help in terms of I don't have to wait.

Anastasios Angelopoulos8:04

It does-

Host8:04

You know

Anastasios Angelopoulos8:04

... but also, why would you go? Do you actually care about, like, other people's videos?

Host8:09

To, to inform your own intuition.

Anastasios Angelopoulos8:11

Maybe, yeah.

Host8:11

Yes.

Anastasios Angelopoulos8:11

Maybe you're, like, interested in comparing-

Host8:13

Like, I'm a shitty prompter, right?

Anastasios Angelopoulos8:15

Are you?

Host8:15

So-

Anastasios Angelopoulos8:15

I don't believe that.

Host8:16

I'm a, a terrible prompter.

Anastasios Angelopoulos8:17

No, no, no.

Host8:17

I learn by example.

Anastasios Angelopoulos8:18

Don't denigrate yourself. Don't denigrate yourself.

Host8:20

Um- There, there, there are many prompters much better than me. Let's say that, right? That's, that's, that's a fact.

Anastasios Angelopoulos8:25

People have all sorts of cool ways of prompting LLMs.

Host8:27

So, yeah, yeah.

Anastasios Angelopoulos8:27

Yeah, it's educational to see.

Host8:28

The, the only way to learn is by, like, well, look at other people's prompts and see the results and go like, "Oh, I didn't know you could do that," and that's how I-

Anastasios Angelopoulos8:35

Totally.

Host8:36

Yeah.

Anastasios Angelopoulos8:36

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Host8:37

Okay. So let's come back to arena. Oh, one thing I do wanna say is the number one use of funds is getting off Gradio. Uh-

Leaving Gradio8:37

Anastasios Angelopoulos8:43

Oh, yeah. Yes. We... Well, listen. Gradio, incredible platform. Gradio scaled us to a million MAL.

Host8:50

Yeah.

Anastasios Angelopoulos8:50

That's incredible. And of course-

Host8:52

Did you tell the Hugging Face folks that?

Anastasios Angelopoulos8:53

Of course.

Host8:54

Yeah.

Anastasios Angelopoulos8:54

Yeah. We're really, really grateful to Gradio for taking us so far. Eventually, you know, it became time for us to move off of that and-

Host9:01

I mean, it's-

Anastasios Angelopoulos9:01

... be able to react sort of-

Host9:02

I, I'm sure Hugging Face would've loved you to stay on.

Anastasios Angelopoulos9:04

They would have, I'm sure.

Host9:05

Um-

Anastasios Angelopoulos9:06

Yeah, yeah.

Host9:06

Was there a technical, like, reason you, you, you just couldn't get the performance?

Anastasios Angelopoulos9:09

Yeah. It just became hard to develop, and there were all these tools that we wanted in React and, you know, to do all the fancy things that you can do in React became kind of like 100 times-

Host9:19

Give us one example of that. I don't know. What, what's a feature that you really wanted?

Anastasios Angelopoulos9:22

Let's say we wanted to create, like, our own custom, like, loading icons for video with notifications.

Host9:27

Okay.

Anastasios Angelopoulos9:28

How are we gonna do that in, in React? It's hard.

Host9:30

Uh, yeah. I mean, we'll make a-

Anastasios Angelopoulos9:32

I'm sure the-

Host9:32

... a custom component in React

Anastasios Angelopoulos9:33

... I'm sure the Hugging Face guys are gonna come in and say like, "Hey, you can do that in Gradio"-

Host9:37

Yeah

Anastasios Angelopoulos9:37

... which maybe you can but-

Host9:38

Of course they're gonna say that

Anastasios Angelopoulos9:39

... also fewer developers know. How are we gonna hire for that? We have to reskill them. The people are less familiar with that stack. It would-

Host9:44

Yeah.

Anastasios Angelopoulos9:45

You know. Anyway.

Host9:46

So it's full React Next.js, all this, all this-

Anastasios Angelopoulos9:48

Yes. Yeah, yeah, all that.

Host9:49

Okay, cool. Are there use of funds that are, that might, that might be interesting? Like, uh, you know, basically-

Anastasios Angelopoulos9:53

No, that's basically it

Host9:54

... how you deploy the resources. Okay.

Anastasios Angelopoulos9:55

Yeah. It's, it's, it's on primarily inference that funds the free usage of the platform and, and then also, uh, uh, hiring of course, headcount.

Host10:05

Yeah.

Anastasios Angelopoulos10:05

We have an office, you know.

Host10:07

That's us.

Cohere Kerfuffle10:07

Anastasios Angelopoulos10:08

It's in SF.

Host10:09

I'll tackle one of the major things this year, which I'm sure you're tired of thinking about, but I-- for people who are not in the loop, this is, uh, gonna be news to them, uh, the leaderboard illusion, the whole thing with Cohere.

Let's summarize the, what they said and then your response.

Anastasios Angelopoulos10:23

Mm-hmm. So leaderboard illusion's a paper that critiques LMArena, and the main-

Host10:28

Pretty, like-

Anastasios Angelopoulos10:29

Yeah

Host10:29

... brutally .

Anastasios Angelopoulos10:30

Well, you know, I would say unscientifically. Um-

Host10:34

And let's be clear, Cohere wasn't doing that well on the leaderboard.

Anastasios Angelopoulos10:36

I think, uh, Cohere was, like, 74. It's all good. You know, it's actually not... It's a, it's a respectable place that they had on the leaderboard. I don't even think it was really Cohere people, like the Cohere model developers doing this.

It was more their research side. But in any case, what does the, what does the leaderboard illusion say? It says that LMArena was what... Their-- the claim is that LMArena was doing this undisclosed, quote-unquote, private testing on our platform, that model providers will send us pre-release models, and we'll expose them and so on and so forth, and that this creates so-called inequities in the leaderboard, you know, due to that pre-release testing.

For example, they will s- they cited that Meta at some point tested-

Host11:15

Llama 4

Anastasios Angelopoulos11:15

... some amount of models with us.

Host11:17

Yeah.

Anastasios Angelopoulos11:17

Of course, we can't disclose all of the details of how all that was done, but that is, that is the main claim of the paper. Now, our response to that paper, it's online. You can find it on Response to Leaderboard Illusion, and our response to that paper is essentially pointing out a series of factual mistakes in the paper that, that question the validity of the claims.

So you can go look at the first version of the paper on Archive yourself, and you'll see the claims. I think most scientists would view that as, um-

Host11:43

Oh, they've corrected it.

Anastasios Angelopoulos11:44

They've cor-... Of course-

Host11:45

Oh

Anastasios Angelopoulos11:45

... because we... I mean, but they didn't correct everything. They just corrected-

Host11:48

Okay

Anastasios Angelopoulos11:48

... some aspects that were just blatantly unscientific and false. But you know, they, for example, um, said that we were, that we only sampled, like, 9% open source models and, like, you know, 60%, like, closed source models, and this created an gap between open and closed source.

But rea- in reality, we're actually really supportive of open source models, and, uh, it was more like 60/40. And, uh, so that was, you know, one of the examples of, of a, of an er- a c- an error in the claims.

Another example is that they were claiming that there was some sort of bias introduced by this pre-release testing, and that it was undisclosed. In reality, as you probably know, we've been doing this pre-release testing for a long time.

Our community loves it. They loved basically getting like-

Host12:28

The secret code names

Anastasios Angelopoulos12:29

... yeah, the secret code-

Host12:30

And it's like-

Anastasios Angelopoulos12:30

Like NanoBanana.

Host12:31

Yeah.

Anastasios Angelopoulos12:31

All that. So NanoBanana, by the way-

Host12:33

It started on you

Anastasios Angelopoulos12:34

... started on us.

Host12:34

Yeah, yeah.

Anastasios Angelopoulos12:35

Right? And people loved it. Went like global sensation.

Host12:37

Yeah.

Anastasios Angelopoulos12:37

Like non- non-zero fraction of the global population using NanoBanana.

Host12:39

Did you talk to Laina about naming it Banana or was that-

Anastasios Angelopoulos12:42

No

Host12:43

... her decision?

Anastasios Angelopoulos12:43

It was, it was their decision, I believe.

Host12:45

Okay.

Anastasios Angelopoulos12:45

But it was sort of this randomly generated thing.

Host12:47

Ah.

Anastasios Angelopoulos12:47

And it just went-

Host12:49

No, no, so apparently, uh, Naina, who's a PM-

Anastasios Angelopoulos12:51

Yeah, yeah

Host12:52

... is named after her because her nickname's Naina.

Anastasios Angelopoulos12:54

Oh. Oh, that's sweet.

Host12:55

Yeah.

Anastasios Angelopoulos12:55

I didn't know that.

Host12:55

It was Naina-

Anastasios Angelopoulos12:56

Yeah, yeah

Host12:56

... put Banana in it, yeah.

Anastasios Angelopoulos12:57

Oh, that's sweet.

Host12:58

And that's the whole thing.

Anastasios Angelopoulos12:58

Yeah, I didn't know that, didn't know the origin story. Yeah, I mean, to us it just looked like sort of a random thing. And then it went-

Host13:03

But it went like clearly heads and shoulders above-

Anastasios Angelopoulos13:06

It's huge

Host13:06

... which, like, before that, there was Reeve Image, remember?

Anastasios Angelopoulos13:09

Yeah, I do. Of course, yeah.

Host13:11

And also, uh, BFL and, uh, all those AI models.

Anastasios Angelopoulos13:13

Yeah, I mean, all those models are also great.

Host13:15

Yeah.

Anastasios Angelopoulos13:15

Um, and I think those teams are also improving quite quickly.

Host13:18

Yeah, yeah.

Anastasios Angelopoulos13:18

But NanoBanana was a sensation.

Host13:20

Yeah.

Anastasios Angelopoulos13:20

I mean, m- that moment alone changed Google's, like-

Host13:24

Roadmap

Anastasios Angelopoulos13:25

... yeah, market share.

Host13:26

Yeah.

Anastasios Angelopoulos13:27

Seriously.

Host13:28

Yeah, yeah.

Anastasios Angelopoulos13:28

I mean, Google's stock, billions of dollars-

Host13:31

Yeah

Anastasios Angelopoulos13:31

... are moving because of NanoBanana.

Host13:32

And now there's like an OpenAI Code Red and everything.

Anastasios Angelopoulos13:35

I, I-

Host13:35

Yeah

Anastasios Angelopoulos13:35

... I don't, I don't know about that, but yes-

Host13:37

Yeah

Anastasios Angelopoulos13:37

... the Information reported this.

Host13:38

I, I would say, like, the, uh, image generation, I would say, has been like this weird part of AI in- overall, 'cause it's not strictly AGI-critical. Like, it's not reasoning. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's not like feeding more context into the model.

It is the model generating a visual, uh, representation. And so it's basically like, uh, I, I always think like, well, you know, Gemini used to get a lot of complaints for generating like racist, racist images or whatever.

Anastasios Angelopoulos14:06

Mm-hmm.

Host14:07

Um-

Anastasios Angelopoulos14:07

Yeah, that was a hilarious moment

Host14:08

... and, and ChatGPT also had, had it i- in the past. And I'm like, "Well, can we just get rid of this? Like, do we have to do image generation?"

Anastasios Angelopoulos14:15

Mm-hmm.

Host14:15

Because let's just focus the, the positive reputation of AI in general on language models and coding and, you know, the other stuff.

Anastasios Angelopoulos14:22

Yeah.

Host14:23

Um, but I, I, I, I'm wrong. I'm- I'm wrong. I'm such a huge NanoBanana Pro show.

Anastasios Angelopoulos14:28

Yeah, I-

Host14:29

Uh

Anastasios Angelopoulos14:29

... totally agree.

Host14:29

It's good.

Anastasios Angelopoulos14:30

I was also kinda wrong about this. I didn't see the positive benefits. But actually I think that these, like, multimodal models are gonna become some of the most economically valuable aspects of AI.

Host14:39

Yeah. AC.

Anastasios Angelopoulos14:39

Both in, both in consumer and also in enterprise, because one of the fastest-growing segments, market segments in AI adoption is marketing and in, in market- marketing and design.

Host14:50

Yeah, ads and-

Anastasios Angelopoulos14:51

Yeah.

Host14:51

And so, so, uh, I'm a content creator, right?

Anastasios Angelopoulos14:53

Yeah, of course.

Host14:53

I need-

Anastasios Angelopoulos14:54

I'm sure you're using it all the time

Host14:55

... infinite supplies of diagrams and explainers and-

Anastasios Angelopoulos14:57

Totally

Host14:58

... infographics.

Anastasios Angelopoulos14:59

Yeah. Soon we're not gonna be even making the product papers.

Host15:01

YouTube thumbnails, yeah.

Anastasios Angelopoulos15:02

We're- they're just gonna be our paper figures are gonna be made by AI.

Host15:04

Actually, yes, yes. I, I do think that it actually one-shots. So, so I, uh, DeepSeek came out with, uh, V3.2 recently. I took their explanations, which are very wordy. Uh, they like very concise papers. It's 23 pages long, but it's very dense.

Anastasios Angelopoulos15:16

Yeah.

Host15:17

And so I just took their explanations of the RL environment stuff, and I fed it into NanoBanana Pro, and it fe- spit an image that I he- I used to understand the paper better. And the fact that I can just casually generate like a paper-quality diagram that would usually take a PhD student like a month to, in like in Photoshop or something to do is, is incredible.

Anastasios Angelopoulos15:36

Yeah.

Host15:36

Yeah.

Anastasios Angelopoulos15:36

It's incredible. It is amazing.

Host15:38

I wanna ask about your principles running Arena. I think you, you manage a giant community, 5 million mile. What have you decided are the core principles, I guess, before becoming a company and now that you're a company? I don't know if there's anything that's changed for you.

Platform North Star15:51

Anastasios Angelopoulos15:52

I don't think anything has really changed. We want to provide the North Star of the industry and center the use cases of real users, foreground those, so that people know what to target. The goal is to create a benchmark that is constantly fresh, that does not suffer over-fitting because of the fact that we constantly have new data points coming in, that tracks the, you know, all the different new models, um, all the different new use cases of AI, and, um, gives the whole world sort of ground truth, uh, for how real users are using these models and how, how good they are on those use cases.

We continue to do quite a few open source data releases. We've probably released more data than y- basically anybody on the real-world use cases of AI, millions and millions of conversations, real-world conversations from real users that the community's using to study and, and improve on.

Host16:47

Yeah. And then I, I think, like, in terms of what you will build versus what we'll not build-

Anastasios Angelopoulos16:53

Mm-hmm

Host16:54

... I guess I, I'm not necessarily caught up on e- everything that you've launched. I, I know recently you've done the, the Dev or Code Arena.

Anastasios Angelopoulos17:00

Yeah, Code Arena.

Host17:00

That's, that's the most recent one, right?

Anastasios Angelopoulos17:02

Code Arena, Expert Arena.

Host17:02

Yeah, Expert Arena. So basically like what, what is in the critical path for you, let's say i- in- for next year, and what, what have you decided you'll never do?

Anastasios Angelopoulos17:11

So let me first talk about things that I'll never do. The platform, integrity comes first to the platform. The, basically the public leaderboard that we show on LMArena, I think of as a charity. It's a loss leader for us.

We don't really make money on the public leaderboard. You can't pay to get on the public leaderboard. It's not like a Gartner in that sense.

Host17:31

Mm.

Anastasios Angelopoulos17:31

It's not like any of these like, uh, you know-

Host17:33

Pay-to-play

Anastasios Angelopoulos17:34

... pay-to-play systems. Never going to be like that. Models are gonna be listed on the leaderboard whether or not the providers pay and whether or not they're getting a good score. They can't pay to take it off either.

And so what that means-

Host17:47

That's very important

Anastasios Angelopoulos17:47

... that- that's very important. And so what that means is that the leaderboard ha- has a certain integrity that will never be compromised, of course.

Host17:53

Yeah, but, but not all preview models will make it onto the-

Anastasios Angelopoulos17:56

No, but that's okay

Host17:56

... that's right

Anastasios Angelopoulos17:56

... those preview models have never been released.

Host17:58

Yeah, yeah.

Anastasios Angelopoulos17:59

Right? Who, who cares about putting unreleased models on a, on the leaderboard? The point is that for every released model, the score that you see on the leaderboard is statistically sound. It reflects the real-world capabilities of the model.

Host18:11

Yeah.

Anastasios Angelopoulos18:11

Why? Because millions of people from around the world have voted for it, and that's where that, where that number comes from. All we do to con- compute that number is millions of people are voting, we take those votes, we turn them into a number.

That's always going to remain, you know, a transparent and fair reflection of model performance. Where are we going? Lots of different new categories. I don't know if you recently saw, we expressed- we, um, we exposed, uh, occupational and expert categories.

So now, single-digit percentage of our user base, we're millions, millions to tens of millions of users, right? So single digit percentages means a lot. Single-digit percentage of our user base are in medicine, in legal, in business, you know, finance, accounting, creative, marketing, stuff like this.

And we're able to show the performance of these models on all these different verticals because we have all these users in our, in our user base. Uh, and we're, we're working more towards multimodal, you know, video we're soon to launch on the site at some point, you know, later this year or early next.

So lots of things in the pipeline.

Host19:08

Amazing. Would you expose an API?

Anastasios Angelopoulos19:12

We've thought about it, yeah. I think it's a, it's a possibility.

Host19:15

I hope so.

Anastasios Angelopoulos19:15

Yeah.

Host19:15

What, what, what are the counter arguments? Like, why, why not?

Anastasios Angelopoulos19:18

Well, there's obviously a need for an API. The question is more of focus of our company. Just because we're a startup, and so we really should be doing one thing well.

Host19:31

Arenas.

Anastasios Angelopoulos19:32

Yeah, arenas.

Host19:33

Yeah.

Anastasios Angelopoulos19:33

So I'm not, I'm not sure that we- how far we wanna sort of splay out and on what timeline we'd wanna do that.

Host19:38

Yeah. Any other sort of like, um, community management tips? You know, m- more broadly, like every AI company like really wants to grow their community. You're obviously-

Community Secrets19:45

Anastasios Angelopoulos19:47

Mm-hmm

Host19:47

... one of the strongest in the world. What's really wo- really worked?

Anastasios Angelopoulos19:51

Well, so first of all, I want to give a shout-out to our community manager, Greg, who is doing an awesome job managing our community, whether that's on Discord, um, or on LMArena. He's really incredible. So I would say hire Greg, but don't-

Host20:04

Don't hire Greg

Anastasios Angelopoulos20:04

... hire Greg.

Host20:04

Don't hire Greg.

Anastasios Angelopoulos20:05

Don't hire Greg.

Host20:06

Find a Greg.

Anastasios Angelopoulos20:06

He's ours.

Host20:07

Find...

Anastasios Angelopoulos20:07

Find a Greg.

Host20:07

Find a Greg.

Anastasios Angelopoulos20:08

But in general, you know, the question of how do you get to so many users, that is a tough question.

Host20:13

And keep. And keep.

Anastasios Angelopoulos20:14

And keep and retain them. That is a tough question because consumer is one of the hardest markets in the world. There's a lot of websites in the world that people can go to, you know. Why should they go to yours?

And the reality is if you want to create a really dominant product, you have to provide people value. And to be frank, I don't think we're all the way there yet. It's not like I have the solution and answer for how to build a, a great consumer product.

If I did, we wouldn't be at 10- tens of millions of users, we'd be at hundreds or, you know, uh, we'd be at a billion users.

Host20:42

Yeah.

Anastasios Angelopoulos20:42

We'd be like-

Host20:43

Is there a world you, like, are bigger than ChatGPT or...

Anastasios Angelopoulos20:46

I don't know. I don't, I don't know that we need to be.

Host20:49

Yeah.

Anastasios Angelopoulos20:50

And I don't know that we ever will be-

Host20:51

Yeah

Anastasios Angelopoulos20:51

... because that's a, that's an extraordinary generational product that they built, right? It took a lot of time and, and to some extent, it also involved luck. There's a lot of lightning in the bottle moments, like NanoBruno was for us, where our user base just like goes up by a lot.

But when those users come, they can just as easily leave. So the way I think about it is every user is earned. You have to earn them every single day. They can leave at any moment. They're fickle. And so all the time you have to be thinking about, how do I provide this person value?

Learning, how are they using my website? What more could I give them? And how do I build in all the retention mechanisms so that they stay, and then they're also bringing their friends.

Host21:29

Is there one that's working in terms of retention? Like you said, a lot of people are signing in now, and that's new.

Anastasios Angelopoulos21:33

Yeah, sign-in was a big driver of retention.

Host21:35

No, no, but what, what did you give them in order to encourage them to sign in?

Anastasios Angelopoulos21:38

Oh, like history. Persistent history.

Host21:39

That's, that's it. That's enough.

Anastasios Angelopoulos21:40

Yeah. That's, that's one thing that has had a big impact.

Join the Team21:42

Host21:43

Okay. Yeah, cool. What do you want from people? What, uh, what are you looking for help on, like any call to action?

Anastasios Angelopoulos21:49

Yeah, I, uh, we are always looking for people to come and join us. If you are one of the best people in the world in your area, whether that's consumer product, whether that is machine learning, whether that is, you know, B2B, go to market, marketing, all these things, we need you at Arena.

We're building like a high-performance team of real experts in everything that they do and, you know, I'm always looking for excellent people to work with.

Host22:12

Do you need like... What about partnerships, right? Like, let's say I'm in Cognition, I wanna partner with LMArena or just Arena. What works for you? What existing partnerships do you already have that, that's really fruitful?

Anastasios Angelopoulos22:25

Yeah. So I mean, we of course, partner with all of the major model labs.

Host22:29

Yeah.

Anastasios Angelopoulos22:30

Um-

Host22:30

And that's, that's just straightforward, like, "Hey, we have a new model here. Here you go."

Anastasios Angelopoulos22:32

Yep, exactly. So I think the, the most straightforward thing would be for someone like Cognition, it's like let's evaluate Devin.

Host22:38

But that's, that's an agent.

Anastasios Angelopoulos22:39

Yeah. But we should be continuing to shape-

Host22:42

You know-

Anastasios Angelopoulos22:42

... our... Well, Code Arena's an agent evaluation.

Host22:44

That's true. That's true. That's true.

Anastasios Angelopoulos22:44

And in fact, I think-

Host22:45

But it's more focused on... Like, all these a- arenas tend to be focused on the model rather than the harness, so.

Anastasios Angelopoulos22:51

But that maybe should change.

Host22:53

Maybe it should change, yeah.

Anastasios Angelopoulos22:53

Maybe we should be evolving towards that direction, and I think the Code Arena is a good example of an arena that would support a full-featured harness like a Devin.

Host23:01

Yeah.

Anastasios Angelopoulos23:02

And so in my view, I'm-- if, if I'm talking to Cognition, I'm saying, "Hey, let's get Devin on the arena and figure out how to l- you know, loop together the Devin harness-

Host23:11

Yeah, I think that's-

Anastasios Angelopoulos23:11

... so that we can..."

Host23:12

Yeah.

Anastasios Angelopoulos23:12

I'm sure, I'm sure that there's something that could be really valuable there, especially given Devin. Last week, people talking about Devin dead. Did you see that?

Host23:19

Yeah.

Anastasios Angelopoulos23:19

People were saying, "Devin's gone." Devin's not gone.

Host23:21

It's not gone.

Anastasios Angelopoulos23:21

Devin's everywhere.

Host23:22

It's doing very, it's doing very well. Uh-huh.

Anastasios Angelopoulos23:23

But people... So can we highlight that for people and show them, hey, Devin is actually the best or one of the best in the world at doing what it does. LMArena can actually do that.

Host23:32

Yeah.

Anastasios Angelopoulos23:32

And our, our, our place as a central evaluation platform allows, allows that to happen.

Host23:36

Yep. Love it. All right. Thank you for owning the State of Evals.

Anastasios Angelopoulos23:40

Thanks so much.

Host23:41

And for congrats on a wonderful year.

Anastasios Angelopoulos23:42

Appreciate it. Congrats to you too.

Host23:43

Thank you.

Anastasios Angelopoulos23:43

Congrats on all the growing, you know-

Host23:45

Yeah

Anastasios Angelopoulos23:45

... momentum in your podcast and in your career.

Host23:48

Thank you.

Anastasios Angelopoulos23:48

It's really impressive to see.