EP018: AI Model Benchmarks That Actually Matter

Most AI benchmarks — MMLU, HumanEval, GSM8K — don't predict real-world performance. We break down why benchmark scores mislead developers, and reveal the five metrics that actually matter: task-specific accuracy on your own data, p95/p99 latency, cost per successful output, consistency, and instruction following fidelity. Then we apply this framework to the April 2026 model landscape: Claude Opus 4, GPT-4o, DeepSeek V3, and Gemini Flash 2.0.