[a16z Enters AI 'Third-Party Arbiter': Vals Raises $40 Million] According to monitoring by Beating, AI model evaluation company Vals AI has completed a $40 million Series A funding round, reaching a valuation of $400 million, led by a16z. Existing investors such as 8VC, Pear VC, and Bloomberg Beta also participated. Vals specializes in third-party evaluations of large models. Currently, many models are released with performance metrics measured and reported by the manufacturers themselves. Vals, on the other hand, uses real-world tasks in programming, finance, law, and healthcare to uniformly test different models. The company claims its results have already been cited in model cards by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and xAI, and its revenue this year has already reached eight times that of its projected revenue for 2025. What a16z values is this 'third-party arbiter' role. Public benchmarks are increasingly prone to score manipulation, inclusion of training data, or even targeted optimization by manufacturers, meaning high scores on leaderboards don’t necessarily equate to real-world usability. This time, Vals has also fully launched Vals Smith, which allows any GitHub repository to be turned into a Coding Benchmark. The system extracts real development tasks from historical PRs and uses hidden tests to check whether models can complete them. Enterprises can thus directly test which model is best suited for their codebase, rather than relying solely on public leaderboards. [Original Link]