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Week 1: Foundations and Economics · Lesson 1.1

What AI evaluation is and why it requires a different approach

Why don't the evaluation methods I already know work for AI-powered product features?

Retired course. Due to the fast pace of AI, this course was retired before full release. Exercises, datasets, and videos referenced in this lesson are not available. The slide content and frameworks remain free to study.

Slide 1 of 18

Reader Notes

This lesson introduces why evaluation for AI features is fundamentally different from traditional software testing. By the end, the concepts and metrics will give language to something that has likely been a vague unease: when an AI feature works in demo but feels unreliable in production. Running the same query through an AI system five times produces five different outputs. Not because anything is broken, but because that is how AI works. And that changes everything about how to evaluate whether a system is ready to ship.

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