In simple English
Language models can say many things, but knowing if they are safe or correct is hard. This tool gives you a way to test them with hundreds of ready-made challenges. You write tasks, send questions to the model, and grade the answers. It comes from the United Kingdom Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute. You need some Python skill to run it and time to set up your test sets.
What it is
Inspect is a Python framework for large language model (a computer program trained on many words to generate text) evaluations, created by the UK AI Security Institute. It includes over two hundred pre-built tests, a command-line interface (a text-based way to run programs), and a web viewer to check results.
What it is good for
Solo builders who want to test if a new language model prompt, fine-tuned model, or agent can solve specific coding, math, or reasoning problems before putting it in front of users.
- Includes over two hundred pre-built evaluations you can run right away.
- Supports multi-turn conversations and model-graded scoring.
- Comes with an MIT licence that allows free commercial use.
- Requires writing Python code to build custom evaluations.
- Needs access to language model API keys which can cost money per test run.
- Has many open issues that may show rough edges in niche features.
manual prompt testing in chat windows
uv
- vibrantlabsai/ragas16k stars
Evaluates retrieval-augmented generation pipelines, whereas Inspect tests general language model tasks and safety.
- EleutherAI/lm-evaluation-harness14k stars
Runs academic benchmarks on language models, whereas Inspect focuses on programmable task evaluations and tool use.
- ggml-org/llama.cpp132k stars
A C and C++ library and command-line tool for running language models locally.
- EleutherAI/lm-evaluation-harness14k stars
Runs standard question sets against a language model and reports the scores.
- mudler/LocalAI50k stars
Serves text, vision, speech, image and video models from one self-hosted service that imitates the paid interfaces.
git clone https://github.com/UKGovernmentBEIS/inspect_ai.git cd inspect_ai pip install -e ".[dev]"