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How to Compare LLMs for Production: A Practical Evaluation Framework

· 12 min read

Key Takeaways

  • Comparing large language models (LLMs) for production involves balancing trade-offs between quality, cost, latency, and reliability, measured on your specific workloads rather than relying on public leaderboards.
  • Begin with a small, representative evaluation set of 50–200 real examples drawn from production traffic, scaling up as decisions become more critical or costly.
  • Fair comparisons require consistent prompts, inference settings, and clear evaluation criteria across all AI models.
  • Use a gate-based decision process: first eliminate models that fail minimum thresholds for quality, latency, or reliability, then select remaining candidates based on cost and secondary metrics.
  • Establish ongoing, repeatable evaluation harnesses to detect regressions over time, following a structured workflow aligned with science-grade LLM evaluation experiments.