2026-06-08
The AI Industry Has Pivoted to Evals — and Is Dodging the Real Question
In 2026, building 'evaluation systems' for AI has become a full-blown discipline — gold-standard datasets, scorers, LLM-as-judge, CI gates, all positioned as the engineering practice that makes AI reliable. Strip away the engineering wrapper, though, and evals are really about one thing: who gets to define 'good,' and who owns the consequences. That part can't be outsourced.