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.
