I second this; even switching between minor versions of a model, you need to adjust prompts: the new model is better by implying a bunch of things that, when included in the prompt, will overdo that thing.

Assessing quality of output is often not trivial, either. Typically, problems that are solved by offloading something to an LLM are super subjective, and customers “feel” something is different is vulnerable.

We try to quantify output differences by many different similarity metrics. But a lot of energy goes into subjectively evaluating if something still works.

We’re talking about SOTA models like Fable, though.

If you’ve got a product where the budget allows for Fable level token costs, I doubt you wouldn’t have the budget to run your evals again on a cheaper model if Fable was unavailable. I mean it wouldn’t even take that much token volume to turn it into a money saving proposition to do the engineering work to switch to a cheaper model.

Fable is primarily used for human in the loop tasks like coding or office work, not in some backend app unless the company has money to burn and doesn’t care about anything other than using the best model available at the time.