Method
Controlled tasks, explicit rubrics, and comparative interpretation of outputs rather than single leaderboard aggregates.
Independent LLM Evaluation Practice
The Bench Co-Operative of California
The Bench Co.
The Bench Co. develops and runs non-conventional evaluations for large language models, with emphasis on methodological clarity and practical relevance. The objective is to identify model behavior that standard benchmark families often fail to surface, then present results in a form that can inform domain-specific decisions.
Scope of Work
The organization evaluates LLM systems under conditions designed to stress reasoning, tool use, and adaptation to ambiguous task constraints. Each benchmark is structured to prioritize replicability, clear scoring rationale, and transparent assumptions.
Intended Use
Support for practitioners who need evidence about model behavior in operational settings, not only in standardized benchmark distributions.
Benchmark Registry
| ID | Name | Public Handle | Focus | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 001 | Hack The Bench | @hackthebench.kcodes.me | Practical model performance under non-conventional task framing. | Active |
About The Bench Co.
The Bench Co-Operative of California is an independent, early-stage evaluation initiative focused on rigorous empirical analysis of LLM behavior. The project is intentionally small and research-led, allowing test design decisions to remain close to core questions rather than external publication cycles.
The current program emphasizes three priorities: identifying failure modes that emerge in realistic task contexts, documenting methodological choices in plain language, and preserving enough structure in each benchmark to support meaningful comparison across model generations.
While the benchmark catalog is currently limited, each entry is treated as a formal study artifact with a defined objective, evaluation protocol, and interpretation framework. This approach enables incremental growth without compromising methodological standards.
Founder Profile: Jason Weiss
The Bench Co. is currently operated by one researcher, Jason Weiss. Jason is a student in Electrical Engineering with an emphasis in Energy Storage Systems.
His technical orientation emphasizes system-level analysis, measurement discipline, and constraints-aware experimentation. Those principles inform the evaluation philosophy at The Bench Co., particularly in the treatment of uncertainty, boundary conditions, and practical interpretability of model outcomes.