ByteDance Seed delivered again.

They released EdgeBench, to test whether AI agents can improve through experience, using 134 real-world tasks that run for at least 12 hours.

The big deal is that it shifts AI evaluation from “what does the model already know?” to “can the model learn while doing real work?”

Huge, because future AI agents will not just answer questions from training data. They will enter messy environments, use tools, make attempts, read feedback, fix mistakes, and slowly build better solutions.

Most current benchmarks are too short for that, so they mostly test memory, coding skill, or one-shot reasoning.

EdgeBench instead gives agents 12-hour real-world tasks with feedback loops, so it can measure whether the agent improves through experience.

Each task has a local workspace for fast trial and error, plus a hidden judge that gives stronger feedback on submitted work, which is meant to feel closer to real expert work.

The authors then ran frontier agents for about 38,000 total hours and tracked how their best score changed as they kept interacting with the task environment.

The big result is that when scores are averaged across many tasks, learning follows a very clean log-sigmoid curve, meaning progress is slow, then faster, then starts to level off.

They also found that newer agents seem to learn from environments much faster, with the top models roughly doubling their 2-hour learning speed every 3 months.