Glossary
Evaluation
A labelled test set that turns 'it seems good' into a number you can regress against.
- Also called
- evals
An evaluation suite is what makes an AI system safely changeable. Without one, no team can tell whether a prompt edit improved things or quietly broke a category of input.
Build it from real domain questions with verified answers, and run it in CI on every change.
Building the set is less work than teams fear. Fifty to a hundred real questions with verified answers, drawn from actual user queries or support tickets, is enough to catch the regressions that matter. The discipline is in running it on every change rather than in making it exhaustive.
Keep the set small enough to run constantly. A hundred cases that run on every commit catch far more than a thousand that run monthly, because the value is in the immediacy of the signal rather than the breadth of the coverage.
Commonly misunderstood: Evaluation is the most commonly skipped step and the one whose absence is felt most, usually about three months in.
Related terms, in context
The concepts you almost always meet alongside evaluation.
- Hallucination
- A model producing fluent, confident output that is not true, the failure mode that makes evaluation non-optional.
- Red teaming
- Deliberately attacking your own AI system to find failures before users or attackers do.
Where this shows up in our work
Evaluation is not an abstraction for us. It is a decision we make on live projects. It shows up most directly in ai evaluation & red teaming, where getting it wrong has a cost someone can measure.
If you are evaluating a vendor on this, the useful question is not whether they can define the term. It is what they measure, what they would refuse to do, and what happens in their system when the assumption behind evaluation stops holding.
Questions
What is Evaluation?
A labelled test set that turns 'it seems good' into a number you can regress against.
What do people get wrong about evaluation?
Evaluation is the most commonly skipped step and the one whose absence is felt most, usually about three months in.
Does Orqent Labs build this?
Yes, AI Evaluation & Red Teaming. We work across India, covering all 19,238 PIN codes remotely.
Building something that involves evaluation?
We will tell you honestly whether it is the right approach for your problem.
Or email bd@dtrasglobal.com · call +91 74118 77878