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Braintrust's Ankur Goyal on Why Evals Are the Core of AI Development, Sonic AI
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Braintrust's Ankur Goyal on Why Evals Are the Core of AI Development
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Feb 24, 2026
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27:51
Interview
Braintrust's Ankur Goyal on Why Evals Are the Core of AI Development
Ankur Goyal
(Founder and CEO, Braintrust, guest)
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Executive Summary
The core of effective AI product development is not prompt engineering or model selection, but a rigorous, continuous focus on evaluations ('evals') to define and measure desired outcomes.
Braintrust achieved early success by targeting high-taste customers (Stripe, Instacart, Airtable) and building a culture of radical customer obsession, where engineers prioritize fixing user issues over rigid sprint plans.
Standard data infrastructure is ill-equipped for AI workloads; Braintrust built a custom data system, Brainstore, to handle the unique scale and complexity of LLM-generated text and JSON.
The future of AI development involves using AI to simplify the process itself, with models now capable of evaluating and improving their own work, a trend Braintrust is embracing with its internal agent, 'Loop'.
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