FINAL Bench: The Real Bottleneck to AGI Is Self-Correction

FINAL Bench, or the Frontier Intelligence Nexus for AGI-Level Verification, is an innovative benchmark designed to evaluate the self-correction abilities of AI models, a critical aspect of metacognition. Unlike traditional benchmarks that focus solely on whether an AI can provide the correct answer, FINAL Bench assesses how AI models respond to their own errors, separating the ability to recognize potential mistakes (Metacognitive Accuracy) from the ability to actually fix them (Error Recovery). The benchmark consists of 100 tasks across 15 domains, embedding cognitive traps to evaluate models' error correction processes. Three principal findings emerged from the evaluation of nine state-of-the-art models: self-correction is the main bottleneck to achieving AGI-level performance, there is a significant gap between models' ability to verbalize uncertainty and their ability to correct errors, and harder problems benefit more from self-correction scaffolding. The results underscore the importance of developing AI models with robust self-correction mechanisms to ensure reliability and safety, as current models often demonstrate high confidence in their outputs without effectively correcting mistakes.