Evaluating LLMs for Under a Dollar (opens in new tab)

Why Evals Matter Training a model is only half the job. Without a systematic way to measure what it can actually do, you are flying blind. The problem is that evaluation is easy to do badly, you can run a benchmark, get a number, and walk away thinking you know something when you don't. This post is about doing it properly on a budget. I ran three standard benchmarks against Qwen2.5-0.5B on a free Colab T4, logged wall-clock time and dollar cost for each task, and documented every methodologi...