No AI model beat a simple hiring-growth rule at picking fast-growing startups
Mento's SAB benchmark tests 14 models from four vendors on 960 startup research tasks and 101 ranking cohorts. Claude Opus 5.5 leads the research tasks with 97.2 of 100 points, but every model still gave a value for some facts removed from the corpus, from 9% to 33% of them. On ranking, all 13 models that completed the cohorts scored below a heuristic that orders companies by past headcount growth.