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

In this interview, Swyx speaks with Anastasios Angelopoulos from Arena, discussing Arena's journey from LMSys at Berkeley to a standalone company, its recent $100 million funding, and the principles guiding its platform. Anastasios explains that the funding will primarily support inference costs and platform development, highlighting the move from Gradio to React for enhanced functionality. They address the "leaderboard delusion" critique, emphasizing Arena's commitment to unbiased model evaluation based on real-world user data. Anastasios shares insights into Arena's community management, the importance of providing continuous value to users, and future plans, including expanding into new categories like occupational and expert verticals, as well as multimodal capabilities like video. He also touches on potential partnerships, particularly with AI agent developers like Cognition, to evaluate and showcase comprehensive AI systems on the Arena platform.