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Micah-Hill Smith: belief

8 Jan 2026 Latent Space Artificial Analysis: Independent LLM Evals as a Service — with George Cameron and Micah-Hill Smith

“In 2023 specifically, I was trying to build a legal AI research assistant. So it actually worked pretty well for its era, I would say.”

— Micah-Hill Smith

Source trail

Everything needed to verify it.

Speaker
Micah-Hill Smith
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
belief
Recorded
8 Jan 2026
Publisher
Latent Space

Transcript context

…Why don’t we even go back a little bit to like why we, you know, thought that it was needed? Yeah. The story kind of begins like in 2022, 2023, like both George and I have been into AI stuff for quite a while. In 2023 specifically, I was trying to build a legal AI research assistant. So it actually worked pretty well for its era, I would say. Yeah. Yeah. So I was finding that the more you go into building something using LLMs, the more each bit of what you’re doing ends up being a benchmarking problem. So had like this multistage algorithm thing, trying to figure out what the minimum viable model for each bit was, trying to optimize every bit of it as you build that out, right? Like you’re trying to think about accuracy, a bunch of other metrics and performance and cost. And mostly just no one was doing anything to independently evaluate all the models. And certainly not to look at the trade-offs for speed and cost. So we basically set out just to build a thing that developers could look at to see the trade-offs between all of those things measured independently across all the models and providers. Honestly, it was probably meant to be a side project when we first started doing it. Like we didn’t like get together and say like, Hey, like we’re going to stop working on all this stuff. I’m like, this is going to be our main thing. When I first called you, I think you hadn’t decided on starting a company yet.…

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