Encyclopedia Evalica / Observability / Model drift

Model drift

/'mah.duhl drihft/A change in model behavior or performance over time, often caused by shifts in input distribution or provider updates. It's typically detected via score trends, topic shifts, or regressions on a fixed eval suite. (noun)

After the provider update, we saw model drift in support tickets about billing.

Customer example

Replit's CTO described how the team moved from manually investigating individual sessions to surfacing patterns of model drift across many sessions in Braintrust, catching quality degradation at scale rather than waiting for one-off bug reports. Read more

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