Module 10 · Evaluation

Lesson 15Proving It — Benchmarks, Judges, Stopwatches, and Invoices

5 topics17 min readTopics 73–77

Welcome to Module 10: Evaluation — the module this entire course has been foreshadowing. Count the IOUs: "measure it on your eval set" (Topics 24, 38, 54, 55), "golden set" (Topic 52), "firewall your evals" (Topic 18), "vibes aren't evidence" (everywhere). Today every IOU gets paid. This is the discipline that separates "my model seems better" from "my model is better — here's the number, here's the variance, here's what it costs." And it's genuinely the highest-leverage skill in applied AI, because everyone can call APIs; few can prove their system improved.

In this lesson

  1. 73AI Benchmarksreading the public scoreboardA benchmark is a standardized exam: a fixed dataset + a metric + a protocol, so any model can be scored comparably. The families worth…3 min
  2. 74Human Evalsthe gold standard, with tarnishFor everything with ground truth, machines grade (next topic). But helpfulness, tone, writing quality, "which answer would you rather…3 min
  3. 75Quality Benchmarkingyour evals, the real skillThe module's center of gravity. Public benchmarks rank the field; human evals are slow and golden; what ships products is your own eval…4 min
  4. 76Speed Benchmarkingthe stopwatch, held correctlyYou've measured speed since Topic 34's exercise. This topic upgrades the stopwatch into methodology, because naive latency numbers are the…3 min
  5. 77Cost-per-Token Analysisthe invoice, decodedThe final measurement: money. Token prices look simple — $/million in, $/million out — but a product's economics live in the multipliers…5 min

Start with Topic 73: AI Benchmarks, or browse all 90 topics.