If You Don’t Understand AI Evals, Don’t Build AI

The podcast explores the critical role of evals in building effective AI products, highlighting that their quality, usage, and improvement drive the success of AI initiatives. Ankur Goyal, founder and CEO of Braintrust, emphasizes that even "vibe checks" are a form of evaluation, particularly useful in the early stages of product development. As AI products scale, more structured evals become essential due to the unpredictable nature of LLMs. Goyal argues that investing in evals creates a durable competitive advantage, more so than focusing solely on the latest models or agents. He also notes the increasing importance of product managers in defining evals, viewing them as the modern equivalent of PRDs, and shares a live demonstration of creating an eval from scratch using Linear's MCP server.