OpenAI Evals

You can now configure and run Evals directly in the OpenAI Dashboard. Get started →

Evals provide a framework for evaluating large language models (LLMs) or systems built using LLMs. We offer an existing registry of evals to test different dimensions of OpenAI models and the ability to write your own custom evals for use cases you care about. You can also use your data to build private evals which represent the common LLMs patterns in your workflow without exposing any of that data publicly.

If you are building with LLMs, creating high quality evals is one of the most impactful things you can do. Without evals, it can be very difficult and time intensive to understand how different model versions might affect your use case. In the words of OpenAI's President Greg Brockman:

Setup

To run evals, you will need to set up and specify your OpenAI API key. After you obtain an API key, specify it using the OPENAI_API_KEY environment variable. Please be aware of the costs associated with using the API when running evals. You can also run and create evals using Weights & Biases.

Minimum Required Version: Python 3.9

Downloading evals

Our evals registry is stored using Git-LFS. Once you have downloaded and installed LFS, you can fetch the evals (from within your local copy of the evals repo) with:

cd evals
git lfs fetch --all
git lfs pull

This will populate all the pointer files under evals/registry/data.

You may just want to fetch data for a select eval. You can achieve this via:

git lfs fetch --include=evals/registry/data/${your eval}
git lfs pull

Making evals

If you are going to be creating evals, we suggest cloning this repo directly from GitHub and installing the requirements using the following command:

pip install -e .

Using -e, changes you make to your eval will be reflected immediately without having to reinstall.

Optionally, you can install the formatters for pre-committing with:

pip install -e .[formatters]

Then run pre-commit install to install pre-commit into your git hooks. pre-commit will now run on every commit.

If you want to manually run all pre-commit hooks on a repository, run pre-commit run --all-files. To run individual hooks use pre-commit run <hook_id>.

Running evals

If you don't want to contribute new evals, but simply want to run them locally, you can install the evals package via pip:

pip install evals

You can find the full instructions to run existing evals in run-evals.md and our existing eval templates in eval-templates.md. For more advanced use cases like prompt chains or tool-using agents, you can use our Completion Function Protocol.

We provide the option for you to log your eval results to a Snowflake database, if you have one or wish to set one up. For this option, you will further have to specify the SNOWFLAKE_ACCOUNT, SNOWFLAKE_DATABASE, SNOWFLAKE_USERNAME, and SNOWFLAKE_PASSWORD environment variables.

Writing evals

We suggest getting starting by:

• Walking through the process for building an eval: build-eval.md
• Exploring an example of implementing custom eval logic: custom-eval.md
• Writing your own completion functions: completion-fns.md
• Review our starter g