Evals

Getting Started with Evals - a speedrun through Braintrust

For software engineers struggling with LLM application performance, simple evaluations are your secret weapon. Forget the complexity — we'll show you how to start testing your LLM in just 5 minutes using Braintrust. By the end of this article, you'll have a working example of a test harness that you can easily customise for your own use cases.

We'll be using a cleaned version of the GSM8k dataset that you can find here.

Here's what we'll cover:

1. Setting up Braintrust
2. Writing our first task to evaluate an LLM's response to the GSM8k with Instructor
3. Simple recipes that you'll need

Reinventing Gandalf

Introduction

The code for the challenge can be found here

A while ago, a company called Lakera released a challenge called Gandalf on Hacker News which took the LLM community by storm. The premise was simple - get a LLM that they had built to reveal a password. This wasn't an easy task and many people spent days trying to crack it.

Some time after their challenge had been relased, they were then kind enough to release both the solution AND a rough overview of how the challenge was developed. You can check it out here. Inspired by this, I figured I'd try to reproduce it to some degree on my own in a challenge I called The Chinese Wall with Peter Mekhaeil for our annual company's coding competition. We will be releasing the code shortly.

Participants were asked to try and extract a password from a LLM that we provided. We also provided a discord bot that was trained on the challenge documentation which participants could use to ask questions to.

Here's a quick snapshot of it in action

The model uses Open AI's GPT 3.5 under the hood with the instructor library for function calls.