Even AI can’t perfectly build Ikea furniture—yet

Building Ikea furniture is not for the faint of heart. So much so that folklore suggests assembling a dresser, a bed, or anything from the Swedish brand can create enough tension it may even destroy a relationship. But beyond the stuff’s being a pain to build, it turns out that the problem-solving and spatial reasoning involved in building Malm dressers or Billy bookshelves are remarkably good benchmarks for assessing just how intelligent AI models are. Aiden Ament and Greg Burnham, researchers at Epoch AI, an artificial intelligence research nonprofit, recently released a report detailing the Furniture Assembly Benchmark, a metric developed to test the actual intelligence of AI models. It centers on how well the model can identify errors in partially assembled Ikea furniture. At a time where tech companies love bragging about how intelligent their models are, it can be complicated to assess how “smart” each model actually is—particularly compared with others. Asking Chat GPT or Claude to spot errors in Ikea furniture assembly puts the models to the test in real-world applications. And while no model got it right 100% of the time, it does seem they are quickly improving. The Ikea …