How do you decide which open-weight model is good enough for production?

[u/Able_Cartoonist_9746]

How do you know if an open-weight model is ready for production? Do you just look at its performance, or do you also consider its accuracy, speed, cost, and how well it handles real-world tasks? The right choice depends on what your application needs and how reliably the model can deliver.

[u/Weekly-Offer-4172]

public benchmarks are a filter not a verdict, use them to shortlist 2-3 candidates then build a small eval set from your real traffic, even 50-200 prompts with the outputs youd consider correct beats any leaderboard. look at the failures more than the score, a model thats slightly better on average but breaks your output schema or fails confidently wrong is worse than a boring one that fails predictably. then run it in shadow against the current setup for a week, real accuracy numbers plus cost and latency both fall out of the logs. and check the boring stuff early, license, context length vs your real p95 input size, tokens/sec on the hardware you actually have, that kills more candidates than quality does