intermediate~4h

Model Selection and Benchmarking

How to select the right LLM for your application: navigating public benchmarks, the build-vs-buy decision, and the proprietary vs. open-weight vs. open-source model framework covering cost, control, data privacy, and customization trade-offs.

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Subtopics
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Exercises
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Projects
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Quiz Qs
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Flashcards
📚 Prerequisites(2)

🎓 Learning objectives

  • Critique public LLM benchmarks (MMLU, HellaSwag, HumanEval) for benchmark gaming and leakage
  • Apply the build-vs-buy decision framework to LLM selection
  • Compare proprietary, open-weight, and open-source models across cost, control, privacy, and customization dimensions
  • Design a task-specific internal benchmark that predicts real application quality better than public leaderboards
  • Estimate total cost of ownership for hosted APIs vs. self-hosted open-weight models

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📂 Subtopics

Related concepts

MMLUHellaSwagHumanEvalLMSYS Chatbot ArenaLLaMAMistralbuild-vs-buyfine-tuningTCO analysisdata privacybenchmark contaminationtask-specific evaluation

Next to learn

finetuning-peftllm-optimizationevaluation-pipeline-design