Production AI Engineering starts with Evals
Oct 11, 2024 · 1:56:16
Ankur Goyal, founder and CEO of Braintrust, argues that evaluation is the core workflow of production AI engineering and shows how his platform makes evals accessible to software engineers. Drawing from his experience at SingleStore and Impira, he details Braintrust's evolution from an eval tool into an end-to-end AI development platform used by Stripe, Zapier, Vercel, and other top AI teams. He shares market data: OpenAI handles over 95% of production workloads, fine-tuning is declining, and open-source models account for under 5% due to reliability issues. Ankur explains why he avoided building a vector database—the real challenge is permissions and joins, not vector search—and predicts o1-style reasoning will replace complex agent frameworks. He reveals Braintrust's differentiators: hybrid on-prem, TypeScript-first SDK, and declarative eval structures.
