Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
Why AI evals are the hottest new skill for product builders | Hamel Husain & Shreya Shankar (creators of the #1 eval course)
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To build great AI products, you need to be really good at building EVALS. It's the highest ROI activity you can engage in. This process is a lot of fun. Everyone that does this immediately gets addicted to it when you're building an AI application, you just learn a lot. What's cool about this is you don't need to do this many, many times. For most products, you do this process once and then you build on it. The goal is not to do EVALS perfectly. It's to actionably improve your product. I did not realize how much controversy and drama there is around EVALS. There's a lot of people, very strong opinions. People have been burned by EVALS in the past. People have done EVALS badly and then they didn't trust it anymore. And then they're like, "Oh, I'm anti- EVALS." What are a couple of the most common misconceptions people have with EVALS? The top one is we live in the age of AI. Can't the AI just EVAL it? But it doesn't work. A term that used in your post that I love is this idea of a benevolent dictator. When you're doing this open coding, a lot of teams get bogged down in having a committee do this. For a lot of situations, that's wholly unnecessary. You don't want to make this process so expensive that you can do it. You can appoint one person who's taste that you trust. It should be the person with domain expertise. Oftentimes, it is the product manager. Today, my guests are Hamel Hussein and Shreya Shankar. One of the most trending topics on this podcast over the past year has been the rise of EVALS. Both the chief product officers of Anthropic and OpenAI share that EVALS are becoming the most important new skill for product builders. And since then, this has been a recurring theme across many of the top AI builders I've had on. Two years ago, I had never heard the term EVALS now it's coming up constantly. One was the last time that a new skill emerged that product builders had to get good at to be successful. Hamel and Shreya have played a major role in shifting EVALS from being an obscure, mysterious subject to one of the most necessary skills for AI product builders. They teach the definitive online course on EVALS, which happens to be the number one course on Maven. They've now taught over 2000 PM's and engineers across 500 companies, including large swaths of the OpenAI and Anthropic teams, along with every other major AI lab. In this conversation, we do a lot of show versus tell. We walk through the process of developing an effective EVAL, explain what the heck EVALS are and what they look like, address many of the major misconceptions with EVALS, give you the first few steps you can take to start building EVALS for your product, and also share just a ton of best practices that Hamel and Shreya have developed over the past few years. This episode is the deepest yet most understandable primer you will find on the world of EVALS, and honestly got me excited to write EVALS even though I have nothing to write EVALS for, I think you'll feel the same way as you watch this.
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