The Core Message

• Evals are the backbone of building AI products that delight customers. They ensure measurable performance improvements, mitigate risks, and unlock scalable deployments for real-world use cases.
• "Evals are not the end, but the means to an end," enabling developers to systematically iterate on models to achieve reliable, high-quality outputs.

Strategic Value of Evals

• Accelerate Deployment: By integrating evals into your product lifecycle, you can go from prototype to high-performing AI product in hours.
• Ship with Confidence: Through systematic testing and evaluation, evals reduce uncertainty, aligning AI performance with business-critical goals.
• Customer-Centric Impact: Tailoring evals to real-world scenarios ensures models solve specific user problems with accuracy and reliability.

Key Takeaways

1. Understanding Evals Maturity Levels
   • Level 1: Ad-hoc, manual testing with limited reliability.
   • Level 2: Structured rubrics and deterministic testing, increasing clarity and iteration speed.
   • Level 3: Automated evals with model-graded assessments, enabling faster feedback loops.
   • Level 4: Continuous evaluation in production, powered by online tracing and feedback mechanisms.
2. High-Impact Examples
   • Case Study: For a legal tech use case, systematic evals helped reduce hallucination rates, doubling accuracy from 45% to near-perfect levels.
   • Real-World Alignment: Evals enabled precise alignment with sensitive, high-stakes tasks like medical and legal document analysis.

How to Build Effective Evals

1. Define the Problem:
   • Clarify business goals and set specific performance benchmarks (e.g., 99% accuracy for automation, 70% for human-in-the-loop systems).
2. Create Evaluation Criteria:
   • Define what good performance looks like and guard against risks such as toxicity or irrelevant responses.
3. Design a Representative Dataset:
   • Include diverse scenarios, from easy to challenging, to capture the full gradient of model performance.
4. Leverage Tools and Frameworks:
   • Tools like PromptFu and OpenAI’s eval products streamline evaluation workflows, from structured outputs to automated grading.

Technical Depth