BIG-bench vs ChatGPT Plugins

BIG-bench measures how well large language models handle reasoning, math, bias, and multilingual tasks across more than 200 community-written evaluation challenges. Google hosts the open source repository on GitHub, where researchers contributed tasks through pull requests and published comparative model scores on the leaderboard. Each task scores models through text generation or log-probability queries, using metrics like BLEU, BLEURT, and exact string match.

Unlike fixed benchmarks such as GLUE or SuperGLUE, BIG-bench grew through community pull requests, so task authors could submit challenges designed to exceed what existing models could solve. The suite also ships BIG-bench Lite, a 24-task subset that gives a cheaper canonical score across the full collection of 200+ tasks. Programmatic tasks support multi-turn model interaction, while JSON tasks work through a simpler task.json format with built-in scoring rules.

ML researchers use BIG-bench to compare model scaling trends and publish leaderboard results. Model developers run evaluations locally with HuggingFace models or through Docker scripts, then submit score files via pull request. The benchmark is archived and read-only as of April 2026, but the tasks, code, and published TMLR 2023 analysis paper remain available for reproducible research.

ChatGPT Plugins was OpenAI's 2023 extension system that let ChatGPT call third-party APIs for live data, calculations, and external services. Plugins appeared as tools the model could invoke during a conversation after users enabled them in ChatGPT. OpenAI's March 2023 announcement listed launch partners including Expedia, Instacart, KAYAK, Klarna, OpenTable, Shopify, Slack, Wolfram, and Zapier.

The beta also shipped OpenAI-built plugins for web browsing via Bing, a sandboxed Python code interpreter, and an open-source retrieval plugin for private document search. Developers published plugins through a manifest file and OpenAPI spec, and ChatGPT Plus subscribers were the first users to enable them in chat.

OpenAI deprecated the plugin beta in favor of custom GPTs. The official blog page now states plugins have been deprecated, and OpenAI ended new plugin conversations on March 19, 2024, with full shutdown on April 9, 2024. GPTs with custom actions replaced the integration model for developers and ChatGPT users.