Miles Kruppa:

Record labels have the Billboard Hot 100. College football has its playoff rankings. Artificial intelligence has a website, run by two university students, called Chatbot Arena.

Roommates Anastasios Angelopoulos and Wei-Lin Chiang never imagined the graduate school project they developed last year would quickly become the most-watched ranking of the world’s best AI systems.

Traditionally, AI technologies have been assessed through advanced math, science and law tests. Chatbot Arena lets users ask a question, get answers from two anonymous AI models and rate which one is better.

The ratings are aggregated onto a leaderboard where big Silicon Valley players like OpenAI, Google and Meta Platforms vie for supremacy with lesser-known startups from China and Europe.

“Everyone is striving to be at the top of this leaderboard,” said Joseph Spisak, a director of product management at Meta Platforms working on AI. “It’s amazing to have a few students get together and be able to create that level of impact.”