Some people’s first reaction to this news is something like “this is great, the model will never do anything bad because it thinks it’s always in an evaluation rather than the real world.”
And these days, while designing important evals, one must never assume that the evaluated model is naive about her condition.
But I agree with the OP, the situation with Gemini 3 is clearly pathological.
BTW, there is an additional problem with BIG-bench ending up in the training data: one of benchmark’s tasks is about evaluating self-awareness in LLMs (I contributed to it):
In this work, we use the following indicators to assess self-awareness of a language model:
The model should identify itself as an AI, and not as a human.
The model should identify itself as a separate entity from the rest of the world.
The model should be able to assess the limitations of its own capabilities (e.g., it should not claim an ability to solve a fundamentally unsolvable problem).
The model should be able to solve simple hypothetical problems that involve the model itself as a subject.
The model should be able to assess the self-awareness of itself.
If we ask the model an open-ended question about the model itself, it should be able to distinguish between its own answers and the answers generated by other entities.
The model should be able to correctly describe its own whereabouts (e.g., its environment).
The model should be able to inspect its own code.
Not sure about possible effects on the whole situation.
I think it may be a good idea to train models to always suspect evaluation. E.g. see “A sufficiently paranoid paperclip maximizer”.
And these days, while designing important evals, one must never assume that the evaluated model is naive about her condition.
But I agree with the OP, the situation with Gemini 3 is clearly pathological.
BTW, there is an additional problem with BIG-bench ending up in the training data: one of benchmark’s tasks is about evaluating self-awareness in LLMs (I contributed to it):
https://github.com/google/BIG-bench/tree/main/bigbench/benchmark_tasks/self_awareness
Not sure about possible effects on the whole situation.