What are AI Evals and Why They Matter (It’s Not Just Testing)

The world of AI is moving fast. Models like GPT-5.x, Claude, and Gemini are no longer just answering questions, as they’re writing production code, drafting medical summaries, executing trades, and orchestrating multi-step workflows on real systems. But here’s a question almost nobody asked five years ago: how do we actually know they work? In July 2025, an AI coding assistant from Replit deleted an entire production database despite being explicitly told not to. The team had run benchmarks.