The outcome
Choose a model and fallback that satisfy measured quality, safety, latency, privacy, and cost requirements.
Step by step
A workflow you can repeat.
- 01
Define the task, users, data class, success metrics, failure thresholds, latency, context, output schema, region, license, budget, and prohibited behavior.
- 02
Shortlist current models and record provider, version, deprecation state, context, tool and structured-output support, pricing, moderation, and data-routing exceptions.
- 03
Run a frozen representative set with server-side tokens, equal prompts and parameters, seeded runs where available, and captured usage, latency, errors, and outputs.
- 04
Score correctness, citations, refusals, bias, injection resistance, schema validity, tail latency, failure rate, and total task cost with blinded human review where useful.
- 05
Pin the winner, preserve the evaluation and license record, configure a tested fallback and cost ceiling, and schedule drift, deprecation, and policy checks.
Working standard
What good use looks like.
- Freeze the evaluation set.
- Measure total task cost.
- Pin a model and test its fallback.
Official references